The Trump administration hasn't wasted much time after last year's historic change-of-power in Washington DC. Since President Trump's momentous inauguration there has been a lot of executive orders undoing a lot of the Obama administration's political legacy. As expected, there has also been a massive push-back by Democrats and establishment Republicans alike. There hasn't been this much excitement and drama coming out of Washington DC in recent memory. Going forward, President Trump will have plenty of foreign and domestic troubles to deal with. The next four-to-eight years will therefore be very entertaining. It is also very likely that the next few years may also be very frightening.In any case, I like a lot of what the Trump administration is struggling to get done in Washington DC. However, staying faithful to the spirit of this blog, I'd like to ignore President Trump's domestic troubles and instead look at some of the geopolitical challenges that are waiting for him and his team.

The Trump presidency has been full of bombastic rhetoric. That was expected. But there has also been a lot of bluster and threats coming out of the White House recently. Thus far, we have no way of accurately gauging which of it is real and which of it is bluff. Ostensibly, however, the United States seems to be on a path to confrontation. On the surface, China, Iran and North Korea seem to be the primary targets.

What the Obama administration did its best to avoid, the Trump administration appears more than happy to give it a try.We may soon begin to see the American empire moving away from the Obama administration's heavy reliance on economic/financial warfare, covert military operations, drone strikes and the utilization of proxies to pursue the American empire's geostrategic interests around the world. We may also begin to see the Trump administration moving the American empire away from its globalist agenda (the promotion of so-called civil society, multiculturalismand open borders around the world in recent decades) and bring it back to its original calling;a traditional superpower pursuing primarily "Anglo-American", "Anglo-Saxon", "WASP" and of course Jewish interests. This may be the reason why President Trump and British Prime Minister Theresa May publicly announced recently that they are no longer interested in pursuing nation building and regime changesaround the world. Translation: They no longer want to promote globalist agendas, at least overtly, because it hasn't worked in the West's favor. It also means President Trump and company may betrying to reconfigure/restructure political circuitry of the American empire to make it a political entity that is rooted primarily in national (Anglo-American) and cultural (Judaeo-Christian) identity.They may be preparing to solve some of the empire's most pressing geopolitical problems in an "Anglo-American-Jewish" framework. And they may be preparing to do so by a more hands-on approach - even if itmeans getting the United States involved into another war.This, therefore, begs the question: Why are there forces within the Western world trying restructure the American empire?

The answer: There is a sense of urgency, at least in some circles,that the Anglo-American-Jewish allianceand the political/financialorder ithad been overseeing during the past century is beginning to face a number ofvery serious challenges around the world. In other words: Unipolarity in global affairs is giving way to multipolarity.

They are faced with a situation where Russia, China and Iran are growing closer politically, militarily and economically. Russia's presence in eastern Europe, the south Caucasus and Central Asia is growing. Russia has established a powerful military presence in the Mediterranean Sea and the Levant. The Russian military has helpedthe Assad government defeat the Anglo-American-Jewish-Turkish-Saudi backed Islamic uprising in Syria. Western sanctions against Russia have not worked and the country is on a fast track to becoming a global power once more. China is on
route to overtake the US economically in a couple of decades. China's military debutin Africa is a major signal that Beijing is becoming a dominant power of its own.Iranian power and influence continues to grow as well. Tehran continues to press forward with its nuclear development. Israel is feeling threatened with the sudden appearance of Russians and Iranians in its very backyard. NATO's second largest military, Turkey, is becoming increasingly unpredictable and it's facing a number of serious internal problems. Uncle Sam's most important Islamic ally in the Middle
East, Saudi Arabia, is also in big trouble. Riyadh seems bogged down in a futile war in Yemen and it faces a growing Iranian threat in the Persian Gulf. Two important allies of Uncle Sam, Egypt and Philippines, are signalling they are ready to jump ship if need be. South Koreans are not fully on board with the US agenda towards North Korea. Georgia and Ukraine are feeling abandoned by their Western benefactors. Moldova, Afghanistan and Libya areslipping from Western control. Serbians are stirring again and Kosovo is naturally on their minds. All of the Balkans is in fact slowly heating up. North Korea continues to develop its nuclear missile capability.Armenia's historic Artsakh province may be on the verge of another war. Although still in its infancy, we are seeing a gradual yet steady process of de-dollarizationin global trade. Finally, suppressed for decades, nationalism is gripping Europe once again. Simply put: A series of major geopolitical miscalculations and blunders by Uncle Sam and company in recent years - coupled perhaps with the inevitable fate all empires eventually face - has brought Western powers to this point -

The aforementioned ailments and disorders, as well as others I will not get into at this time, is threatening the now century old political order the Anglo-American-Jewshave selfishly benefited from. In other words, the geopolitical status quo we live in today, created as a result of the first and second world wars, is beginning to die. The political and economic landscape around the world is therefore beginning
to change and nations like Russia, China and Iran are holding the keys to the West's ultimate success or failure.

Faced with setbacks and failures in recent times, Western
powers basically feel the need to formulate a new grand strategy. The ultimate intent is to remain in the game in the twenty-first century. The Trump administration will therefore have the next four-to-eight years to navigate through the turbulent waters of our time, with the hope of finding a newplace for the Western alliancein today's rapidly changing world.With the left-wing of the Anglo-American-Jewish political order effectively out of power(at least for a while) the right-wing of the Anglo-American-Jewish political order seems to have calculated that they need a confrontation not with Moscow but with Beijing, Tehran and/or Pyongyang.

I personally think Iran may be the first - and perhaps only - actual victim of the Trump administration.

From Washington to Tel Aviv, talk regarding Iran can be characterized as war rhetoric. In fact, Western powers have already been involved in military operations against Iran through military proxies (i.e. Islamic extremists and Saudi Arabia) in places like Syria and Yemen. This however has not yielded the results they are looking for. Moreover, the Obama administration's lifting of sanctions on Tehran was a measure to at least delay Iran's nuclear project, and even perhaps lure it Westward.As predicted at the time, that approach has not worked well either. Tehran's nuclear programcontinues to develop. Tehran continues to remain close to Moscow and Beijing. Moreover, Tehran's footprint in the Middle East continues to grow.The Trump administration may therefore try a more aggressive approach to deal with Tehran political resurgence.As it happened with Iraq prior to its invasion by Western powers in the spring of 2003, I suspect the verbal threats against Iran will reach a fever pitch at some point. Tehran will be accused by the Anglo-American-Jewish West of all sorts of bad things, and tensions between the two opponents will gradually escalate. I believe Iran will face a war sometime in the next four years. To be more exact, Tehran will face a war if it does not give into Anglo-American-Jewish demands and if Western powers calculate that a war with Iran is something they can afford to risk.

Therefore, the though talk we see over China and North Korea may for the most part be scaremongering and/or a diversion.Western powers know that when it comes to matters pertaining to
regional politics and trade, China is essentially too big
to fail, and North Korea is essentially a nuclear-armed hornets nest. Seoul South Korea is well within North Korea's conventional missile and artillery range. What's more, any kind of war against China and/or North Korea runs the high risk
of engulfing the entire western Pacific rim (militarily and economically a very strategic region for Washington DC) into flames.Besides, similar to how Western powers need NATO to curb the growth of Russian power and influence in the western-end of the Eurasian landmass, they need the presence of a viable China to limit the expansion of Russian power in the eastern-end of the Eurasian landmass. Simply put: Western powers may fear China's rise, but they also know that alienating Beijing won't help.

Therefore, for Western policymakers, the key to realizing success is not to defeat China in a war but to somehow figure-out a way to drive a wedge between Beijing and Moscow. Doing so will not only help contain Beijing and Moscow but it will also make them both more dependent on Western powers.

Western powers will at some point seek a way to contain Beijing's growth. In other words, they will try to stop Beijing from looking far beyond its borders. They have the leverage and the tools to do so. China's economic dependency on the United States is one of the major leverages. American military might is one of the major tools.It should be added that China's Turkic/Muslim Uighurs (a very violent secessionist minority in the country, who have an operational office based in Washington DC) can also be used (as they have been) to put pressure on Beijing.But going to war against China is not something Western military planners would be crazy enough to actually want.There is however the possibility that, if need be, they may try to get another country in the region like Japan into a conflict with Beijing. The Trump administration's rhetoric about China and his desire to develop American industry by curbing the country's economic ties to countries like China and Japan may be related to the above.

With regards to North Korea: As long as Pyonyang remains contained and isolated, Washington DC will not try to alter the status quo. Pyongyang is not as crazy as we are being told it is. North Korean officials know that the most powerful weapon in their disposal is their ability to frighten South Korea, Japan and the United States by acting aggressive. Pyongyang acts aggressive from time-to-time essentially for three reasons: To keep potential predators away; get attention from the international community; and create an atmosphere it can exploit for political and economic concessions. In a certain sense, North Korea can also be characterized as China's guard dog. Consequently, I don't think Western military planners would risk a direct confrontation with North Korea - especially, as noted above, the South Korean capital is well within the range of literally thousands of North Korean artillery units.

Then again, we are going headlong into uncharted territory in human history and I may therefore be wrong on all accounts. In any case, to better understand the Trump administration's approach to nations like Russia, China and Iran, I believe we need to assess itwithin the following framework.

The past several years seems to have finally convinced the right-wing of the Anglo-American-Jewish alliance that Russia will not be defeated through a direct assault, be it political, be it economic, be it military.Despite many efforts to isolate and contain it in recent years, Russia has come on top every time. Russia has responded to aggressive Western inroads against its regional interests by mutilating Georgia and Ukraine, militarily establishing itself in the Middle East like never before and deepening its ties with China and Iran.They may have therefore come to the understand that an openly aggressive approach to their Russian headache has not worked well for them. Moreover, China has been rapidly expanding its influence around the world, including in the Middle East and Africa, as a result of the West's hand off approach with Beijing. Due to Western tolerance, China has now begun encroaching on Western interests. They have therefore seen that a lenient approach with Beijing has not worked for them. Finally, Iranian influence has been rapidly expanding throughout the Middle East as a result of Western inaction vis-à-vis Tehran. They were unable to bring Tehran to its knees through sanctions. They were unable to foment an Arab Spring like uprising in Iran. They were unable to lure Tehran into compliance with their more recent so-called "Iran deal". As Uncle Sam reluctantly stood back and watched, and got severely criticized by right wing Jews, Iran kept expanding its influence from western Afghanistan to southern Lebanon. They therefore understand that their lack of forceful action against Tehran has not worked well for them either.

To summarize: Russia has grown stronger and more self-reliant as a result of Western aggression. China and Iran have gotten stronger and more self-reliant as a result of Western inaction and/or acquiescence. The key to solving this geostrategic conundrum for the West therefore requires the recalibration and/or reversal of certain foreign policyimplementations vis-à-vis Moscow, Beijing and Tehran.This, in my opinion, translates as less pressure on Moscow; more pressure on Beijing; and putting Iran on a war notice. This more-or-less is the new formula the Trump administration may have been tasked with.

Being that Moscow and Beijing are too big to fight, by lessening pressure on Moscow to lure it Westward and increasing pressure on Beijing to make it retreat inward, they will try to isolate Iran, which is the smaller and the weaker of the three.Ultimately, the agenda is to drive a wedge between all three.If this agenda succeeds, they will have lured Moscow into a renewed dependency on Western powers (which by definition is containment); they will have contained China'sexpansion far beyond its borders; and they will have rolled backIran's growing presence throughout the Middle East. A lot of this may sound far-fetched or implausible but this, in my opinion, is the Trump administration's grand plan.And speaking of geostrategic formulations and calculations, the need to have Sunni Arab states in the region in-line and on-board with the Anglo-American-Jewish plan against Iran will ultimately be the reason why the US embassy in Israel will not be moving to Jerusalem anytime soon.Nevertheless, with every passing day the war drums are getting louder. It's beginning to feel as if the Trump administration will get the US involved in devastating war sometime in the next several years. Perhaps sooner than later. A growing numbers of Americans are beginning to worry about this as well.The US, after all, is a war economy. The US dollar remains the global reserve currency essentially because of Western military interventions around the world. Therefore, every so often Anglo-American-Jews need to go to war to maintain their economic, financial, political and military dominance in the world - the status quo now for over a century now. Every so often, Western powers will have to destroy a nation in some part of the world in order to maintain their standard-of-living at home. Anglo-American-Jews can therefore be characterized as vampires; they need blood to survive. With the aforementioned unholy trinity in remission around the world in recent years, its need for blood to survive is growing ever more urgent with each passing year.President Trump and company may have been placed in charge to oversee and manage the upcoming bloodletting.

The Trump administration recognizes that thereare a number of serious geopolitical problems that need to be solved. In the opinion of a growing number of political observers around the world, President Trump's friendly gestures towards Russia is a strategic ploy meant to drive a wedge between Moscow, Beijing and Tehran. In other words, it's a classic case of divide and conquer, which most likely will not work. But they will try nonetheless because, as noted above, other methods have already been tried.

The Trump administration's desire to reformulate US strategy is upsetting many in the Anglo-American-Jewish political order's Neoconservative and Neoliberal Interventionist camps for two fundamental reasons: First: The aforementioned do not think the Trump administration would be able to drive a wedge between Moscow, Beijing and Tehran. Second: They do not want to see better Russian-American relations for any reason whatsoever. These anti-Russian elements within the Western political apparatusare therefore doing their best to cause problems for the Trump administration. Michael Flynn was their first victim. There may be yet others. They will seek to strike down any player in the Trump administration that they believe is trying to better Russian-American relations; Russians must remain "bad guys" at all costs.

This is essentially the motivation behind all the current anti-Russia hysteria, witch hunt and new McCarthyism we are witnessing in the United States. This is also why the deep state forced President Trump to strike at Syria after yet another false flag attack on Syrian civilians. Thankfully, however, the Trump administration's limited cruise missile stike on an auxilliary airbase in Syria was for the most part for domestic consumption. It was a costly fireworks display to basically placate President Trump's domestic enemies. All this however signals two things: President Trump is under seige by powerful elements within his own government and these forces will fight his agendas every step of the way. The Syrian missile strike as well as Steve Bannon's and Michael Flynn's ouster from the Trump administration are ominous signs that President Trump is gradually caving in to internal political pressure. This was predicted in my previous blog commentarey.With the above, I basically outlined reasons why although I liked Donald Trump the presidential candidate, and I continue seeing him as the lesser evil in Washington DC, I nevertheless could not get myself to support him by voting for him. Readers of this blog should know by now my feeling about democracy. I have mentioned this before: In the big picture, the Trump administration seems to be the remaking of George Bush's infamous Neocons; those behind the disasterous farce known as the "war on terrorism" that got the United States into devastating wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. It does not matter that old-school Neocons dislike him. President Trump is still serving the right-wing of the Anglo-American alliance (i.e. traditional Anglo-American imperialists) and the right-wing of organized Jewry (i.e. Zionists). Nothing truly good can therefore come out of his administration as a result. Even if President Trump did try to do the right thing, his powerful enemies will do their best to undermine his effort, as they have been successfully doing so thus far. The only thing I can continue to realistically hope, at least for the short-term, is the thawing of relations between the Uncle Sam and the Russian Bear. Such a thing, if it happens, that is if Russophobes in Washington DC don't sabotage it, will give Moscow just a little more time to further strengthen the country's military defenses and deepen its economic and financial self-reliance.Driving a wedge between Russia, China and IranIt is no longer a theory of mine. A recent article from Wall Street Journal all but admitted that the Trump administration's Russia-friendly stance may be a tactic to drive a wedge between Russia and Iran. A recent RT article suggested that the Trump administration is also trying to drive a wedge between Russia and China. And a recent article by Pepe Escobar predicts that the effort to smash the developing alliance between Russia, China, Iran will fail. Personally, I think these are all accurate assessments. That some in the Neoconservative and Neoliberal Interventionists camps are trying hard to sabotage the Trump administration's said efforts are all together another story. Yes, there are some in the Anglo-American-Jewish political establishment that do not want to see improved relations between Russia and the West for any reason. This is why President Trump is being viciously attacked by them over his non-hostile stance over President Putin and Russia. But others who seem equally influential in the American empire's so-called deep state may have assessed the situation and concluded that, at least temporarily,rapprochement with Russia may be the best way forward for the Western alliance. This tactic is now being openly discussed in public -

In my opinion, those behind the Trump administration have come to this conclusion only because of President Putin's political mastery and the Russian people's tenacity to endure great hardship and still remain faithful to their state. Under President Putin's brilliant leadership the Kremlin has maneuvered Russia into such a powerful position in recent years that some in the Western world, as well as nations in regions affected by Russian statecraft, feel they have no choice but to recognize Russia's importance on the world stage; at least for now, until they figure out what to do with the Bear. They are therefore seeking to negotiate with Moscow. What's more, there are predictions now that even with low oil prices, Russia's economy is set to grow, something Western policymakers thought impossible not too long ago -

Not only has the West's multi-pronged campaign to curb Russia's growing power has not worked, Russia has actually gotten stronger politically and militarily, and is growing more self-reliant financially and economically as a result.Moscowstands out as the most powerful and influentialmember of the developing alliance between Russia, China and Iran. While Russia's economy is no where near that of China's, Russia's military capabilities are incomparably better than of China's. Moreover, Russia, a massive landmass essentially stretching across Euraisa, from Europe to the the United States, contains virtually unlimited amounts of all kinds of natural resources. Scientific research and technology in Russia is much more advanced than in China. Moscow's political reach goes much further than that of Beijing's. What's more, Russian statecraft, drawing on centuries of experience in diplomacy and geopolitics, remains unrivaled today. Compared to Russia and China, Iran is obviously the junior player with the least amount of assets.

From a geopolitical perspective, Russia today is by-far the most powerful country in the Moscow-Beijing-Tehran alliance.Why am I pointing this out? Because I want to help the reader understand that the key to weakening or dismantling the alliance between
Russia, China and Iran is to somehow take out the Russian factor from it. Taking out China or Iran as a factor in the said alliance will not have their desired effect.Western policymakers on both sides of the political divide understand all this. Their greatest fear in recent centuries - as well as their envy - has been the nation of Russiaand the awesome potential it possesses under its soil. With Russian (as well as Chinese and Iranian) power and influence resurging once again, Western strategists are justifiably beginning to fear that they are falling behind the times. After nearly a century of near total global hegemony, this is a very serious fear for them. Hotheads in the bunch want to maintain or even increase pressure on Russia to keep Moscow contained and on the defensive, whereas sober heads among them seem to have assessed the situation at hand and decided it's time they put aside their overt aggression against Russia, at least temporarily, and try to work with Moscow to tackle other problems.

Enter Donald Trump and company.

There are those in the Anglo-American-Jewish alliance that understand that due to the West's 25-plus years of flawed strategic planning and execution, a potentially dangerous alliance is developing between Russia, China and Iran. They understand that such an alliance, if ever allowed to mature, has the potential to deal a death-blow to Western global hegemony. It therefore has to be suppressed. It has to be prevented from maturing. They will seek ways to stop it. Since their previous policies have not worked and since they can't wage war against all three, they have to figure out some other plan.The Trump administration seems to have therefore decided on a different political approach to deal with the situation.

The
key to solving this geostrategic conundrum currently facing the
Anglo-American-Jewish political order may require the recalibration or reversal of some of the West's foreign policy calculations vis-à-vis
Moscow, Beijing and Tehran.This is why
in my opinion President Trump has been signaling his desire for
warm relations with Moscow, cold relations with China and hostile relations with Iran.

In their effort to convince Moscow to take a
step back from Beijing and Tehran, I suspect they will promise Moscow
the lifting of sanctions, reordering of the world order and perhaps even recognition of Russian Crimea. The Trump administration may very well be prepared to try the above, if Russophobic elements in the Anglo-American-Jewish political order do not sabotaging it.This does not mean those behind President Trump have had a fundamental change-of-heart about Russia. I have no doubt that both sides of the political divide in the American empire continue
seeing Russia as a competitor and as an enemy. Ultimately, what they are trying to do is make their geostrategic agenda against all three - Russia, China and Iran - somewhat easier. Since they know they cannot attempt a frontal attack, they seem to be employing a classical divide and conquer technique. This is why the Trump camp may be employing a tactic to take Russia, the said alliance's most problematic and powerful factor, out of the equation.

Knowing Tehran's ideologically driven government and patriotic population, chances are Iran wont give into the Trump administration's demands. Iran may therefore, at one point in the next few years, face a military coalition comprised of Western powers, Israel, Saudi Arabia and a number of other regional Sunni Arab states. I believe this is the overall calculus being formulated by those who have taken power in the White House today.The only question here is, how will Moscow and Beijing react to a Western-led war against Iran?I have no doubt high level Western officials are using back-channelsto determine what the Russian and Chinese response will be in case of a Western attack on Iran.How they proceed forward with their agenda against Iran will ultimately hinge on what they gather in Moscow and Beijing.

To summarize: The Trump administration's approach to dealing with Western setbacks in recent years entails embracing Russia, scaring China and preparing for war against Iran.By lessening pressure on Moscow they are trying to lure it
Westward, or at least not force it further Eastward.By increasing pressure on Beijing, they are trying to force it to retreat inward or at least get out of the way. Iran, the smaller and weaker of
the three, faces a war if it does not heed to Anglo-American-Jewishdictates.The Trump administration's approach to China is a play coming right out of the
Anglo-American playbook and its approach to Iran is a play coming right out of the Jewish-Zionist playbook.The Zionist factor

Western powers know they have to stop the budding alliance between Moscow, Beijing and Tehran from deepening. It should also be emphasized that the Jewish or Zionist factor in this equationis quite pronounced. With official Tehran now playing a big role in Lebanon, Syria and Iraq, their fear therefore is that if left unchecked Iran will disturb what is termed as the "balance of power" in the region. This so-called balance of power is where Western powers, the Zionist state and several US-backed Arab monarchies enjoy total supremacy and complete impunity. As a result, many in positions of power in the Western world, Israel and Saudi Arabia have been quite vociferous in calling for a preemptive war against Iran. They fear that they will no longer have the impunity to do as they will once Iran becomes a nuclear power and begins projecting its interests throughout the region. A Wall Street Journal commentary in 2013 had this to say about the topic -

The above quotes explains things quite well: Syria's Assad's government has to be defeated no matter what. What's painfully obvious here is that jihadists in Syria are really not much of a concern for Western or Israeli officials. As I have been telling my readers for a very long time now, jihadists have never been a serious problem for them. A few dead Westerners and some damaged property in Western nations from time-to-time is a very small price to pay for exploiting a tool as effective and as powerful as Islamic extremism. The reader should therefore see how Moscow's deepening relationship with a nuclear weapons capable Iran as well as Russia'sexpandingmilitary presence in Syria is of great concern for Jews; because it restricts Israel's military capability in the region. Simply put: A nuclear armed Iran is looked upon as an existential threat by many Zionist Jews and their supporters in the Western world. The last thing Zionists want to see taking shape in Israel's neighborhood is an Iranian-backed "Shiite Arc" stretching from western Afghanistan to southern Lebanon.Because Tehran has not yet produced nuclear weapons, they may be feeling that they have a window of opportunity. They also fear the window is shrinking with each passing day. This is the urgency they are facing. I want the reader to understand that Israel's main concern in the Middle East
today is not Turkey, not Egypt, not Saudi Arabia, not Jordan, not Lebanon, not Syria, not Hamas, not Hezbollah, not ISIS, not Al-Qaeda, not
Al-Nusra... but Iran. They don't even try hiding it anymore -

It is also well known that keeping regional nations embroiled in
never-ending wars and sociopolitical and socioeconomic unrest is also a Zionist
strategy of survival in the inhospitable region, if not a more sinister plan of
expansion -

As
soon as the Soviet Union stopped being a political factor in the region some
twenty-five years ago, Anglo-American-Jews began sowing unrest in the Middle East. With
the Soviet Union out of the way, they embarked upon an ambitious plan to redo the map of Middle East. The agenda in question has become increasingly violent in recent years. Consequently, nations like Libya, Iraq, Yemen and Syria are now destroyed and the rest of the region's Muslim
majority nations, including Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Lebanon and Turkey are
becoming increasingly vulnerable. Once Israel's staunchest opponents,
Syria, Iraq and Libya will henceforth pose no serious challenge for
Israel, at least not for a generation or two, if not more. Moreover, Saudi Arabia is too deeply connected with Western powers to pose a real threat to Israel, and Turkey is too intimately connected to Jews in general to turn against Israel. The
only Islamic nation in the region that Western powers have not been able to occupy, destroy or contain is a nuclear capable Iran. What's more, the war in Syria has
helped elevate Iran's political stature throughout the Middle East and increase
its military footprint all the way to the Mediterranean coast. Their
fear is now reaching critical levels as a result of Russia'smilitary successes in Syria.Thanks to Moscow, the war in Syria is all but over and the Syrian government has won. Russia and Iran are the undisputed power-brokers in Syria. As a result, Zionists are now panicking. The above is essentially why Jews and their supporters in the Western world are doing their best to get on the good side of the Russian Bear. But, judging from Moscow's reaction, it doesn't seem to be working -

Western powers now fear that a fully developed Iranian/Shiite Arc, especially one that possesses nuclear weapons and one that is backed by Russia and China, can forever disrupt the status quo in the region. Such a situationcan significantly diminish Israel's long-standing military superiority inits backward neighborhood. Consider this: An Iranian zone of influence pressed tightly against Israel's borders, like in Lebanon and Syria for instance, will also diminish the Zionist state's nuclear deterrence. With a nuclear capable Iran pressed against its borders, Israel's nuclear stockpile is essentially worthless. Moreover, Israeli
military bases, airfields, naval ports, power stations, refineries, energy storage
facilities, ammunition depots, as well as its Diamona nuclear reactor will be
well within the range of a large number of ballistic missiles in Iran's and Hezbollah's military arsenal. Iran's position therefore looks pretty good -

To put it simply: The expansion of Iranian power and influence to the borders to Israel threatens Israel's military superiority. And since Israel today exists only thanks only to its military superiority over its backward neighbors, the rise of Iran in the Middle East threatens itsvery existence. This is essentially what's keeping Jews and their Shabbos Goyimin the Western worldawake at nights.

It should also be mentioned that the prospect of Iranian dominance in the Middle East also threatens some of the region's Sunni powers. Although Iran's and Turkey's relations are warm today, Ankara, an increasingly Sunni powerthat also has designs for the region in question, would ultimately prefer a contained Iran. But the main problem Tehran faces in the Sunni-Muslim world is not Turkey but Saudi Arabia, the self-proclaimed leader of the Islamic world.Riyadh has been and will continue being an integral part of the Anglo-American-Jewish alliance's effort to contain Iran. Which is why Saudi-backed terror organizations like ISIS and Al Nusra have never attacked Israel. When the Saudi Arabian "prince" recently announced that President Trump is a "true friend of Muslims" he was essentially saying the following: We've come to an agreement with the White House on how to solve the Iranian problem. Make no mistake about it: Saudi Arabia is actively preparing to "roll back Iran". It's already engaged in military operation against Iran through its regional proxies (i.e. Islamic extremists). Their fear of Iran is also why Saudi Arabia is embroiled in the war in Yemen. And this is the reason why why Tel Aviv is establishing ties with "gulfmonarchies". And this is why the Western presstitues continue praising the filthy dictatorship responsible for spreading Islamic radicalism around the world -

Iran's foes therefore are not only the Angl0-American-Jewish world but also the Saudi Arabia-backed, Sunni/Wahhabi world.For the aforementioned, Iran'srise in the region must be stopped.But such a thing will be easier said than done. The strategically vital Strait of Hormuz, the narrow waterway that controls 20% of the world's oil, is a hostage to Iranian arms. Even taken alone, Iran is a very difficult nation to defeat militarily.Iran plus Russia, plus China would therefore be virtually impossible to defeat. Which brings us back to this: Theyknow that the only chance they have to defeat Iran is if they are
able to somehow eliminate the Russian and Chinese factors in the region.Their goal is to therefore figure out a way to somehow make Moscow, and to a lesser extent Beijing, put a little distance between them and Tehran. The questions is, will they succeed.

Simply put: A Russo-Sino alliance stretching from
northwestern Europe to southeastern Asia is therefore as unacceptable to Anglo-Americans as the Iranian Arc is to Jews. From a Western perspective, the Russian Bear therefore cannot be allowed to get too close to the Chinese Dragon.

Western powers fear the growing alliance between Moscow and Beijing for very obvious reasons: Such an alliance can potentially be unstoppable and such an alliance can potentially deal a death blow to Anglo-American economic interests around the world. In geopolitics, one cannot leave anything to chance. Therefore, from an Anglo-American-Jewish perspective, if a threat is seen growing anywhere on earth, everything must be done to prevent it from growing to maturity.Previously, the Obama administration used an aggressive stance towards Russia and a softer stance towards China with the hopes of keeping the two apart. It was a tactic that did not work, essentially because both Russia and China did not waiver from their agendas and their power and influence - as well as their bilateral ties - continued to grow. This needless to say infuriated the Anglo-American right (i.e. those behind President Trump).

Similarly, in order to encourage Iran to put a halt on its nuclear program and its expansionist ambitions, the Obama administration decreased pressure on Tehran. The hope was to at least delay Tehran's agendas.I talked about this matter in a previous blog commentary. Again, it was a tactic that did not work. It did not work because both Russia and Iran did not waiver from their respective agendas and their power and influence as well as their bilateral ties continues to grow. And this needless to say has infuriated the Anglo-American-Jewish right (i.e. those behind President Trump).

To President Trump's credit, we must recognize that the Western alliance's open hostility towards Russia has not done it any good. Therefore, why continue failed policies?As I have been pointing out, Russia continues to grow in power and influence despite Western aggression. Therefore, why not try a new approach?

I must reiterate that the Trump administration's desire to find common ground with Moscow emerged as a direct consequence of Moscow's
military and economic successes in recent years. President Putin
has placed Russia in a powerful position in the Middle East and
elsewhere and because Western sanctions have not worked to reign in
Moscow, many in the West are beginning to understandthat they have no choice but to accept Russia as a
major geopolitical factor throughout Eurasia and neighboring regions. They are as a result using a different approach, with hopes of luring Moscow away from Beijing and Tehran. Similarly, previous Western policiesvis-à-vis Beijing has not been productive. Beijing is growing increasingly independent and China is on route to by-pass the United States in global trade. From an Anglo-American perspective, Sino-Western relations also needed recalibrating.

But, as I previously mentioned,predictions ofwar with China may be for the most part scaremongering. I do not believe they truly desire a war with China. Western powers know that when it comes to matters pertaining to
regional politics, trade and economy, China is essentially too big
to fail. What's more, any kind of war against China runs the high risk
of engulfing the entire western Pacific rim (militarily and economically a region of critical importance for Washington DC) into flames. Western powers will at some point seek to contain Beijing's expansion. Ultimately, however, Western powers need a powerful China to limit the growth of Russian power and influence in the eastern end of the Eurasian landmass. The key for Western policymakers therefore is not to defeat or weaken China but to keep it dependent on Western powers and to also somehow figure-out a way to drive a wedge between Moscow and Beijing.Which brings me to Iran: The Anglo-American-Jewish political order's most urgent problem today is Iran (mostly due to the evil trinity's powerful Jewish factor). Which is why I believe the Trump administration will try to go to war against Iran sometime in the next four-to-eight years, if the conditions are right.

To summarize: As
a result of Western political blunders and miscalculations around the world in recent years there is
now a growing Russian presence throughout the world; a growing Iranian presence from western Afghanistan to
the eastern Mediterranean; and a growing Chinese presence from the South China Sea to Africa. The situation at hand threatens the Anglo-American-Jewish alliance. Enter President Trump: The Trump administration will try to do what the Bush and Obama administrations failed to do: Roll back and/or smash these advances against Western interests.Nevertheless, there remains one fundamental question: How successful will the Trump administration be in its aforementioned agenda? In other words, would Moscow be willing to curb its ties with Beijing and Tehran for better ties with the West?Will Moscow take the bait?

The proverbial "carrot and stick" approach (the use of rewards and punishment) is used by parents and governments alike around the world to solve various types of problems. Western powers applied this traditional method of problem solving in its dealings with the Soviet Union and its successor, the Russian Federation. During the height of Soviet power, Western powers used the stick approach (i.e. punishment)to suppress Moscow. When the Soviet Union was in its death throes, Western powers used the carrot approach (i.e. reward) to facilitate its demise. Various forms of carrots were used throughout the 1990s when the Russian Federation had a drunk at the helm and the country was essentially ruled by Western-backed Jewish oligarchs.When theRussian Federation began actively pursuing its interests once again back in 2008, Western powers quickly resorted back to the stick approach to contain Moscow's resurgence. Now, some in the West may be coming to the understanding that the stick approach is no longer working. Some among them may have therefore come to the conclusion that Moscow can be once again lured into cooperating with the West.So, the question: Will Moscow take the bait? In other words, will Moscow willingly take a step back from Beijing and Tehran for better relations with Western powers?Due to the fluid nature of geopolitics, pasthistory and the very nature of the nations themselves,I cannot in all honesty give a definitive answer to the posed question. Such a question can only be answered by time. In the next four-to-eight years, to be exact.Why the ambiguity? Why can't I unequivocally say Moscow will not take the Western bait?

It is not a secret that Moscow, ideally, would like better relations with theWestern world. After all, psychologically, Russians do identifythemselves as Europeans; they do prefer business opportunities in the Western world; and they do enjoy Western products and Western vacation spots as much as any other people (although I admit Russians are less prone to destroy their country in its pursuit). We also know that Moscow would like nothing more than lifting of the sanctions it has been subjected to and having NATO stop its eastward expansion. We also know that Moscow would go to great lengthsto have Western powers recognize Crimea's new status as part of the Russian Federation.So, what if the Trump administration put some of these tasty lures - or all of them - on the negotiations table with Moscow?How will the Kremlin react? I'd love to say, I have no doubt Moscow will react to such an offer by Western powers by instead reinforcing its ties with Tehran and Beijing. But I can't.Although Moscow and
Beijing have very good relations today, they both see each other as regional competitors and, therefore, long-term threats. The same can be said of Moscow and Tehran. Western
strategists may therefore be trying to exploit flaws and weaknesses that naturally exists in the relationship between Moscow, Beijing and Tehran.Therefore, in my opinion, there is at least a theoretical possibility that Moscow may at least entertain the idea of downgrading its ties with Beijing and Tehran in lieu of bettering relations with Western powers. There are other cultural, historic and geostratgic factors that also come into play in this discussion and should therefore be assessed as well.

As good as it may look on the outside,
Russia's relationship with China and Iran is not on the same level as, for example, its
relationship with Kazakhstan and Armenia. Geopolitical circumstances in Eurasia - namely Western machinations throughout the region - is basically the reason why Moscow, Beijing and Tehran have come closer in recent history.
In essence, European Christians, Middle Eastern Muslims and Asian Buddhists have come together to fend-off Anglo-American-Jews.In other words, the budding alliance between Moscow, Beijing and Tehranis an alliance between three culturally very different nations and an alliance that has developed only out
of political necessity. This is why although the relationship between the three Eurasian powers is good and has room for growth, it still remains somewhat at an arms-length.

Historically, Russia and Iran,
much like Russia and Turkey, have been competitors and, at times,
enemies. In fact, all of the south Caucasus, including all of present day Armenia, was liberated from under Persian rule by the Russian Empire some two hundred years ago. Soviet and British forces invaded Iran for a short period during the Second World War to secure strategic oil fields. Russian and Iranian interests in the Caucasus, Caspian Sea and Central Asia, where Moscow and Tehran have vital stakes, have not always converged. Iran also tried to export its version of Islam
into former Soviet space during the 1990s. This needless to say was a cause of concern in Moscow. Simply put: Throughout history Russia and Iran have often been on opposing sides.

Similar comments can be made about Moscow and Beijing. Russia and China are neighboring superpowers and they each have national aspirations and interests that often do not converge. As a result, they have clashed at times. In the big picture, Russia and China are not natural allies but natural competitors. For example: Lack of arable land and energy resources have been and will continue being China's Achilles'heel. China needs continuous and unhindered access to immense amounts of natural gas and oil keep its gargantuan economy alive and growing and vast tracts of arable land to feed its billion-plus population, which has become increasingly affluent in recent years. Beijing has been looking at Russia as a source for energy and food -

Dependence on foreign nations for strategic resources, which is a strategic problem, is essentially why Beijing is seeking to expand its influence in energy rich regions like Central Asia, a territory that is considered to be well inside Moscow's sphere of influence. Moreover, Russia's sparsely populated eastern provinces contain vast tracts of arable land and immense amounts of energy and these regions also have a fast growing Chinese population.

Similar conflicts of interest have led to clashes between Russia and China in the not too distant past. It was these types of problems between the two Eurasian giants that convinced Western powers in the early 1970s that it was time to jump in and exploit the situation. Uncle Sam's intent was geostrategic: To exploit the problems that existed between Russia and China at the time by playing one side against the other. It worked. By economically tetheringChina and incorporating it into the Western financial system, Western powers were creating a powerful counter-balance to Soviet influence in the region and securing China's economic/financialallegiance to the Western world. Moreover, by exporting production to China, Western corporations would also enjoy unlimited access to cheep labor for their products and, more importantly, no regulatory restrictions hindering their profitable operations. Establishing intimate economic and financial ties with China was a win-win scenario for Western powers:Western capitalists made a lot of money by movingtheir production to China; they made Beijing economically/financially dependent on Washington DC; they turned China into a powerful counter-balance to the Soviet Union. It is important to note that no one at the time was expecting the Soviet Union to collapse so early. In any case, ideally,
Russia would not like to see a very powerful and/or an
expanding China on its eastern frontier, especially since Russia's eastern regions as noted
above are sparsely populated and Chinese businesses as well as migrant workers have
moved there in large numbers in recent years.

The aforementioned is essentially why Western powers think the budding alliance between Moscow and Beijing is fragile and can be interfered with. We often see this in their assessments. For example: "China has had much more to gain from the U.S.-led international order"; "The big problems in the Russia-China relationship cannot be solved by a gas deal".Similarly, Moscow would rather not see the rise of any major
power, let a lone an Islamic
one, on its vulnerable southern periphery. The acknowledgement of this aspect of Russian geostrategy regarding Iran is essentially why the following two articles by the Wall Street Journal and Newsweek point out, "there's daylight between Russia and Iran" and "why the Iran-Russia relationship is so uneasy".An article appearing in the Carnegie Endowment's Moscow branch also talks about the "historic mistrust"between Moscow and Tehran.Consequently, theTrump administration, breaking
with the George Bush and Barack Obama administration's failed policies, is
trying new ways to manipulate and exploit what it sees as weak-points or flaws in the
budding relationship between Russia, China and Iran.As I noted above, there is at least a theoretical possibility that Moscow may take a step back from Beijing and Tehran if, as they say in American parlance, the price if right. If Moscow does so, it would be a serious strategic mistake. If Western powers succeed in luring Moscow Westward once again, they will succeed in weakening not only China and Iran but also Russia itself. If Moscow allows Western powers to drive a wedge between it and
Beijing and Tehran, Russia will also be isolating itself.
After all, what guarantee will Moscow have that the Trump
administration, or one that follows after it, would not turn against it in the future?

Simply put: Russia is more powerful and therefore politically more valuable in an alliance with China and Iran.

Ideally, a superpower, especially one that borders many nations, would rather be surrounded by smaller and/or weaker nations, especially when those nations are not part of its ethno-cultural and/or political orbit. That said, Moscow does not have much to worry about over Iran's expanding power in the Middle East. Iran's growth in the region will naturally be kept in-check by the region's other powerful players, Turkey, Israel and Saudi Arabia. More importantly, the reverse is also true. A powerful Iran in the Middle Eastwill keep Turkey, Israel and Saudi Arabia in check. The aforementioned three have had too much sway in the region. This has had a very adverse effect on Russia itself, as we saw in Afghanistan, Chechnya and Georgia. Moreover, there isn't any possibility, at least not in the next few generations, that Shiites and Sunnis will unite into a single force. The Islamic world will remain deeply divided well into the foreseeable future. The expansion of Iranian power will therefore bring a true balance-of-power in the region.Similar things can be said about China. A powerful China will be kept
in-check by the alliance between US, Japan and south Korea and vice
versa.What's more, apowerful Russian military along with robust Russian trade relations with China will keep Beijing looking elsewhere for expansion. The same applies to Iran. A powerful Russian presence in the Caucasus and Central Asia will keep Tehran's attention elsewhere.

Moscow can make Beijing and Tehran look away from its spheres of influence in three ways: By becoming economically self-reliant,strengthening its military capabilities and keeping its relationship with Beijing and Tehran close and constructive.

By doing so Moscow will encourage both China and Iran to look away from Russia's backyard and concentrate their efforts in places like the Middle East, Africa and southeastern Asia, where they will inevitably run into conflict with the Anglo-American-Jewish world. The more Beijing and Tehran are made to expand into areas of Western interests, the better it will ultimately be for Moscow, because such a situation will make Moscowpolitically more valuable not only for Beijing and Tehran but also for Western powers.Maintaining
a close relationship with China and Iran is therefore key to making Russia untouchable,
as well as an extremely important geostrategic factor around the world.Moscow's formula to realizing the above is to therefore maintain a powerful military and economic presence throughout Eurasia, maintain a healthy friendship with Beijing and Tehran and always let Western powers know that Russia is ready for dialogue and friendly relations.

But, being that geopolitics is a game of chess, there is a possibility, albeit remote, that the Kremlin may yet make an ill-advised move.In my opinion, the risk of Russians making a wrong move hinges upon what Western powers are genuinely willing to give up in return for Moscow's cooperation.Although Moscow will not degrade its ties with Tehran, there is a good possibility however that Moscow may be willing to limit the level of Iran's military presence in Syria.

Moscow can do this in two ways: 1) By supporting Sunni and Kurdish self-determination in Syria when the time comes to finally settle the Syrian crisis. 2) By covertly giving Western powers and Israel some room to operate inside Syrian territory. Moscow may already be doing this. Limiting Iran's presence in Syria will weaken (but not totally compromise) the Iranian Arc. How would this be in Moscow's interest? Not allowing a powerful Iranian presence in Syriacan work in Russia's favor because Moscow can use it as a lever to demand major concessions from Anglo-American-Jews in return. In other words, Moscow would be sacrificing Iranian interests, not its own, to gain concessions from the West. By not allowing Iran a bigger footprint in Syria, Moscow would also lessen the possibility of a major war igniting between Iran and its regional antagonists seeking to curbits growth. Moreover, limiting Iran's footprint in Syria would make all parties involved - Western powers, Israel, Turkey, Saudi Arabia as well as Syria and Iran - variably dependent on Moscow.I believe what I described above are areas where Moscow might be willing to cooperate with Western powers and Israel. Whether or not such an approach would succeed is altogether another matter.

Ideally, Moscow would rather not see a very powerful Iranian presence (or Western or Turkish or Saudi Arabian or Israeli) on its southern periphery.Moscow will therefore try to manipulate the situation in Syria to become the country's main power-broker. If it can do so by limiting Iran's footprint in Syria, it will do so. By working with all parties involved Moscow will seek to become anindispensable player in Syria.This has already begun. What we are seeing in Syria currently is conflict management Russian style.

Nevertheless, I would like to state once more that Moscow will not sacrificeits hard earned gains in Beijing and Tehran, nor will Beijing and Tehran be interested in down-grading their ties with Moscow. Despite their obvious relationship problems, all three need each other on the global stage. In the big, geostrategic picture we have in the world today, Moscow does not really need the Western world's recognition of Crimea's unification with Mother Russia. It would be nice, but not in any way an absolute necessity. Moreover, Moscow is learning how to live with Western sanctions quite well - as it should. In fact, being that Russia today is developing an internal market, the technological and industrial base - and all the natural resources it could possibly need - it's in Russia's long-terminterests to develop economic and financial self-sufficiency. It's in Russia's long-term interests to eliminate any degree of dependence on Western powers. The Western sanctions it has been subjected to in the past few years has been a wonderful opportunity to do all this. The process has in fact startedas we are seeing an increasing number of high quality products "made in Russia".

Russians are masters of the grand chessboard, they have a keen understanding of history and they recognize the critical importance of multipolarity in global politics. I am therefore quite confident that every possible scenario is being meticulously assessed in the Kremlin, even as I write this.I do not believe Moscow will be successfully baited by Western powers. The signs we see coming from the Kremlin clearly suggest Russians will eagerly cooperate with the West on a limit number of matters but they will not under any circumstances distance themselves from Beijing or Tehran.This is why there are a
growing number of voices throughout the world claiming the Trump administration's tactic to drive a wedge between Russia, China and Iran will not work-

Russians have made plenty of
mistakes in the past, but they rarelymake the same mistake twice. Being that Russians are astute politicians and diplomats and because Russian society is very patriotic - and has in recent years redeveloped a healthy suspicion of Western powers - I expect to see Moscow remain steadfast.The Russian Bear always seems to be a few steps ahead of Uncle Sam in recent years. I therefore see Moscow using its powerful position in the world today to instead mostly toy withWestern powers. I see the Kremlin observing, assessing, maneuvering, manipulating, exploiting, advancing in some areas and retreating in others. President Trump's antagonists in the Western world will therefore be proven right. The White House will not get far in its effort to lure Moscow Westward. What's more, as we have seen since President Trump's inauguration, Russophobes in the Western world will do their utmost best to ruin any attempt to better Russian-Western relations. Russophobia, the instinctual fear of Russians, runs in the blood of many Westerners. Those of us who worry about Russia falling into a Trump trap do not therefore have much to worry about. However, those of us who do worry about a major war coming sometime in the near future do have a lot to worry about.

The 20th century political order is dyingWhen an older politicalsystem falls apart in
time or is destroyed in a major war, an international struggle begins for the right of establishing a
new political order. We are are the precipice of a historic restructuring of the global political order.Western powers will ultimately fail to drive a wedge between Moscow, Beijing and Tehran. Russia, China and Iran will continue to expand their global presence. The political landscape around the world is changing at a faster pace than anyone had predicted.We are in the midst of a historic paradigm shift, which essentially means that the "postwar order is dying".The postwar political order - the
geopolitical status quo of the past 70-plus years - is indeed in tatters. Western powers will continue suffering setbacks. New powers will emerge to fill voids. A major war will therefore beinevitable.Everywhere I look I see dire predictions of a world war. Everywhere I look I see asense an urgency. Even men like Mikhail Gorbachev and Henry Kissinger have recently made comments about the dangers facing the world today.

There
was a historic change-of-power in Washington DC. Right-wing sentiments
are gripping Britain and continental Europe. Western powers have begun losing their grip over certain strategic areas of the world. There are realignment of alliances. Novorossiya is on the verge
of exploding into a new cycle of violence. The war in Yemen has not
abated and can very easily burst out of its borders. We may be one incident away from witnessing a full scale war between the US and Iran. The Syria cauldron continues to boil, drawing Turkey into its flames. Tensions along the Armenia-Azerbaijan border remain very high and there are predictions that the dictatorship in Baku may try a renewed military offensive there sometime in the near future. Tension along Israel's border with southern Lebanon has remained high since the war of 2006 and there are renewed fears
that Israel will use the next opportunity to outright destroy Hezbollah's fighting capabilities and its ammunition stockpiles. Tensions between Western powers and Russia are as bad as it has ever been. Tensions between
the US and China is at an all-time high. There is a NATO buildup in Central Europe.Emerging powers around the world are stretching and diluting Western power and influence. In my opinion, this emerging world order began ten years ago with President Putin's now historic Munich Speech in 2007 -

Less
than a year after this speech Russian forces liberated Abkhazia and
South Ossetia from the clutches of Anglo-American-Jews. Soon thereafter, Moscow counterattacked Western inroads
in Ukraine and Syria by annexing Crimea, Karabakhizing Novorossiya and establishing a
powerful military presence in Syria. Moreover, Russia's relations with China and Iran have gotten deeper and more efficient during the past ten years. What's more, Russia'spresence in places like Cuba, Libya, Egypt and Afghanistan are on the increase once again. Russia and the West have been clashing ever since President Putin's speech in Germany ten years ago.I have outlined much of this struggle which I termed Cold War II in the following blog commentaries -

On its knees and on the verge of collapse in the
1990s, Russia has, as if overnight, become major global player once again. Moscow is
currently filling vacuums left behind in the Middle East,central Asia, eastern Europe,North Africa, south Caucasus
and the Balkans. Moscow has worked relentlessly and meticulously to put itself back on the global chessboard.

In an effort to salvage its global hegemony in the face of these changing times, the Anglo-American-Jewish political order is leading humanity into yet another major global
conflagration; which is why are facing a third world war.

Some say we are in the preliminary stages of the war. Some say the war has already begun and that we are in its initial stages. Whatever the case may be, the world is indeed in turmoil and many areas of the world stand on the verge of war. A single unfortunate incident or a malicious provocation can unleash a torrent of unintended consequences. The spark
that may send the current degree of intensity to a higher level can happen at any time and in a number of places. Wars in Syria and Iraq are not the only concerns. The situations we have in Iran, Lebanon, Libya, Yemen, Armenia, Moldova, Serbia, Ukraine, Venezuela, the south China Sea and North Korea are also volatile and can explode at any time. Conflict in such places can also rather easily spill over into neighboring regions. Turkey and Saudi Arabia are experiencing this already.

If Western-led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan over the past twenty-five years were imperial wars of expansion, the current wars and the wars that await us in the near-future will be characterized as attempts by Western powers to reverse their setbacks and preserve their power and influence around the world.This is essentially why the Trump administration is trying to get the US on a war footing. The next four-to-eight years will be characterized by an effort to restructure the Western alliance and preserve Western power and wealth. Needless to say, Russia, China and Iran see the writing on the wall-

I would like to once more remind my reader that President
Putinset the precedence to much of today's events some seventeen
years ago when he unexpectedly ascended to the helm in Moscow.Western powers have been suffering one setback after
another ever since. They are even losing their control over strategic regions
of the world where they have had an iron grip over since the Second World War. Let's recall that seventeen years ago Russia was on the verge of
being a failed state. Today, Russia is registering success-after-success
around the world. As the Washington DC based Stratfor reluctantly put it, "Russia is making inroads everywhere" -

The rise of nations like Russia, China and Iran signal one thing; the weakening of the Anglo-American-Jewish political order. It was not supposed to be this way. Western powers had found
themselves alone on the very top of the world's food-chain in 1991 when
the Soviet Union suddenly imploded and ceased to exist as a geopolitical deterrence.
Fate (as well as an anti-Soviet
conspiracy of the global elite) would hand Western powers the world on a
silver platter. With a massive geopolitical vacuum thus created before
them, "forces of freedom" began raiding Middle Eastern oil fields with
impunity. They also began the systematic invasion of former Soviet
nations with "forces of democracy". Without a capable opponent on the
other side of the political divide to check their actions, they moved
their chess pieces around at will and with great disregard to human
suffering. They did this despite persistent complaints from around the world. The Western political establishment had become a monster of global proportions. Now this monster is now finally feeling pressure. It is beginning to fear for its life. This is when the monster will be at its most dangerous. Nevertheless, its future does not look well.

Why Armenia needs to remain close to the Russian Bear

The flames ignited by Western powers are slowly getting closer to Armenia's borders. There are troubling signs that the flames will be getting more intense in the coming years. Ukraine, Syriaand Iraq will remain very volatile. Turkey, Lebanon, Georgia and Azerbaijan will remain unpredictable, The situation mayunexpectedly worsen in any one of these countries. Iran, thus far stable, may find itself in a major war sometime in the next few years. The Azerbaijani leadershipwill most likely continue its war of attrition, hoping to foment a political uprising inside Armenia. Western-funded activists operating throughout Armenia will continue stirring trouble in the country. Simply put: The situation around Armenia is highly volatile and it may get much worst before it subsides. Armenia's neighborhood is living up to its terrible reputation.

Dangerous neighborhoods, like the one in the south Caucasus, as well as dangerous periods in human history, like the times we are living in, should underscore the strategic importance of maintaining close ties with Russia. Times like this is ultimately why Armenia needs the Russian Bear. Times like this is also why Russia needs Armenia. For Armenians, however, nature of Armenia's ties with Russia is a matter of life and death. It is therefore a matter that is existential in nature; so much so that Armenia's ties to Russia is in my opinion more important than its ties to the Armenian Diaspora. I am saying this as a Diasporan Armenian. And I am saying this for a very simple and logical reason: Only the Russian Bear can help Armenia defend itself from regional predators. If Armenia's existence was ever threatened, which is a mathematical inevitability for a place like the south Caucasus, the best that the Armenian Diaspora would be able to do is send some money, a few hundredmilitaryvolunteers, and of courseorganize a lot of rallies in Western capitals. In other words, the Armenian Diaspora would be utterly useless for Armenia in times of a major war. Note: What happened in Artsakh in the 1990s was not a major war, Azerbaijan did not even have a standing army until very late in the war,and the Armenian Diaspora was not instrumental in wining the war for Armenia. Artsakh was liberated because of the fighting spirit of Armenians in the region and because of direct military support from Russia which began arrivingstarting in 1992, after a post-Soviet Moscow had regained its geopolitical composure. I therefore am a Russophile just as much as I'm an Armenian nationalist. I therefore take heart in knowing that Russia and Armenia today are as close as they have ever been -

We can in no way give credit to the "people" in this regard. Had it been for the so-called "democratic process" Armenia would have been torn from Russia a long time ago, and the country would have been thoroughly ravaged as a result. Armenia has stayed under Russia's protection thanks to a handful of people known to Western activists as the "Karabakh clan". Despite
the current Armenian leadership's flaws, both real and perceived, they need to
be at least commended for keeping Armeniawithin Russia's orbit. Armenia's Republican Party (Հանրապետական Կուսակցություն) therefore continues being the lesser evil in the country's decrepit political landscape.

On the eve of Armenia's parliamentary elections, I'd like to point out that the popularity enjoyed by unsavory characters likeGagik Tsarukyan, Raffi Hovanissian, Levon Ter Petrosian and Nikol Pashinyanis ampleproof that Armenia's electorate remains emotionally unstableand politically illiterate. Armenia's citizenry cannot be trusted with the thing called democracy. Gagik Tsarukyan's Բարգավաճ Հայաստան կուսակցություն is arguable the most popular political party in Armenia today. Why? Simply because Gagik Tsarukyan gives out handouts. In other words, he is popular because Armenia's electorate is full of beggars with no dignity or self-respect. Don't believe the nonsense about Armenians hating their oligarchs. In the depths of their hearts Armenians actually admiretheir oligarchs.This is why Armenia's oligarchs are warmly received every where they go in the country. This is why not one of them have in any way been harmed by any Armenian (including nationalist crazies) during the past 25-plus years. At worst, it can be said that Armenians are merely envious, jealous of their oligarchs. In any case, democracy and capitalism for a politically immature and materialistic people like Armenians is a painful road to national suicide. Most Armenians do not yet understand this. A growing number however are beginning to. One of these is none other than Markar Melkonian (Monte Melkonian's brother).Markar Melkonian has been warning Armenians aboutdemocracy, capitalism and Russophobia for some years now.

Armenia has survived the past twenty-five years in the south Caucasus (as well as the past two hundred years to be exact) not because of capitalism, democracy or the "almighty" Armenian Diaspora, but because of its close ties to the Russian nation. Russians laid the foundations of today's Armenia. Russians continue keeping the nation alive. Armenians therefore need to be happy that the Russian Bear needs Armenia, and will continue needing Armenia for as long as the Caucasus region and its surrounding areas remain Turkic and Islamic. This is why Russian forces cover Armenia's western border. This is why despite Armenia's flirtations with Western powers; despite the fact that Armenian politicians today cannot be trusted (in fact most Armenian politicians would not think twice about aligning with Western powers if the price is right);despite the fact that a majority of Armenians today are ready to flee their country - Moscow gives Yerevan the economic help- trade, investments, cheep energy, etc. - to keep Armenia afloat and military resources -affordable or free state-of-the-art weaponry, military intelligence and training - to defend itself against regional predators like Turkey and Azerbaijan. Simply put: Armenia exists today not because of the "nation building talents" of Armenians in Armenia or big talking, under-performing Armenians of the "Diaspora" but because of Armenia's close ties to Russia. Armenia's leadership must understand this fact profoundly.

Moscow sells weapons to Azerbaijan essentially because it wants to stop Azerbaijan from drifting too far from its orbit. Maintaining ties with Azerbaijan enables Moscow to have some leverage over Baku. This keeps other nations like Turkey and Israel from further deepening their ties with Azerbaijan. Do we Armenians really want Baku to fall fully under Turkish and/or Islamic influences or would we rather have Moscow hold at least some sway over Baku? As long as Russia is providing Armeniathe proper military countermeasures (often times free ofcharge) to defeat what Azerbaijan is purchasing with its petro-dollars from a number of countries around the world, is it really smart for Armenians to throw temper-tantrums every time Moscow sells anythingto Baku?By engaging both Yerevan and Baku Moscow manages to maintain control over both Armenia and Azerbaijan. Essentially, it's conflict management, and it's something that is in Armenia's interest. Nevertheless, although there remains some flaws in the relationship (in my opinion mostly due to the absence of Armenian lobbying efforts in Moscow) Russia's goodwill towards Armenia is genuine and long-termed. When it comes to geostrategic matters there is a lot of convergence of interests between Russia and Armenia. Russia and Armenia are therefore NATURAL allies and will remain so for the foreseeable future. Also, while Western powers are in decline, Russia is on the rise politically, militarily and economically - and will remain so for the foreseeable future. On all accounts Russia is therefore a historic OPPORTUNITY for Armenia.However, many Armenianstoday seem incapable of understanding any of this because there are large numbers of professionals working hard to distort reality and sow Russophobia throughout Armenian society. The following American agent with an Armenian last name is one such individual -

Because Armenian society today is saturated by Western operatives, Armenians, generally speaking, seem incapable of fully appreciating Russia as a historic opportunity. Because of Armenian materialism, in addition to its Western agents, Armenian attention is naturally being drawn towards Western countries (US, Canada, Britain, France, Germany, etc.), Western goods (cars, electronic gadgets, clothing, music, etc.) and Western concepts (democracy, globalism, feminism, gay rights, etc.). For these people, Western products and Western lifestyles are worth risking life and limb, as well as Armenia's well-being. I found that one of the main concerns about worsening Russian-West relations several years ago among Armenians in Armenia was the fear that Western products, such as American and German cars, would be difficult to import as a result. I would tell such people, why don't you instead drive Russian cars that cost a lot less but are much more reliable? I would get either blank stares or laughs in reply. And they say Armenians are smart?

Related to this discussion is language: It is very worrying for me that the younger generation in Armenia speak better English than Russian (at least from what I see in Yerevan). This serious problem is now being noticed by others as well-

Political power travels on the coattails of cultural influence. Movies, television programming, music, cuisine, clothing, literature and language are some of the more potent tools of cultural influence found in the Western arsenal. It is through these tools that Western powers are capable of penetrating through even the hardest of national borders. These tools are used to subjugate people around the world. What makes these tools of cultural influences so dangerous is that those who fall victim to them do not know it. Think of it in this way: If we want to sing their songs, watch their films, eat their foods, drive their cars, trade in their money, wear their clothing and speak their language, how can we ever think of them as the enemy? How can be keep our attention to deepening our ties with our natural allies? How can we stop them from embedding their agents in our society? By importing their culture in any given land, they have already won half the battle. Who today understands this? Sadly, not many.

Again, I want to remind the reader that I do not speak Russian.I
am an Anglophone because I have lived in the West for most of my
life. In fact, I have a better command of the English language thana vast
majority of its native speakers. However, my intellectual honesty and objectivity as well as my ability to think out of my skin helps me see the English language for what it really is. English today is the the
catalyst upon which the agendas of globalization (where everybody speaks
English and trades in Western money and where there are no genders, religions, borders or nationalities)
and westernization (the spread of materialism and the worship of Anglo-American-Jewish-African pop culture) travels upon around the
world. It would also be wise to recognize that language imparts outlook and mentality on its speaker. Every language has a value system of its own. Every language is a world of its own. English today may be the language of international trade, but it
is also the language of idiots, perverts and Western financed activists.
For a nation like Armenia, learning English is also the first steppingstone for
either leaving the country permanently or working for some
Western-financed NGO that is trying to undermine Armenia's statehood.

The
most powerful weapon Western powers have in their arsenal is by-far the cultural influence they have over all humanity.
And it is we the sheeple, and the choices we make, that give them their power over us.By
far, the most important language in Armenia today (after Armenian of course)
has to be Russian. Again, I say this as an Anglophone. I look at this matter
logically: Russian is the language of Armenia's largest and most affluent diaspora,
largest investor, largest trade partner, largest energy provider,
largest arms supplier and ONLY military ally. Armenia today
lives because of its close ties to Russia, yet young people in
Armenia are striving to learn English instead?!?!?! And they say Armenians are smart?!?!?!

I reiterate: Russia is Armenia's most important partner and Russia is home to the world's largest and most affluent Armenian Diaspora. In fact, Armenians of Russia are disproportionately represented in the highest layers of Russian society. Yet, there is no discernible agenda topromote Armenian interests in Moscow today. Turks and Azeris on the other hand do their best to lobby Russian officials. Armenians in contrast are no where to be seen in the Kremlin. Yet, Armenians can be in Moscow what Jews are in Washington DC - but Armenians are too busy begging for handouts and genocide recognition in the West.And they say Armenians are smart?!?!?!

After
Russian, I believe German, French, Iranian, Chinese and Turkish should also be taught in Armenian schools. English should be part of
this tertiary group of languages. Although English is the language of international trade, it is always more effective to speak with people in their native language. In other words, an Armenian businessman will gain a lot more attention and sympathy in places like China, Iran, India, Germany, France, etc., if he converses with his counterparts in their language. When I share these thoughts with fellow Armenians, I mostlyget blank stares or laughs in reply. And they say Armenians are smart...

I have learned that Armenians can be very capable in many professions, but when it comes to truly understanding the political world they live in or planning for Armenia's future, Armenians can be very idiotic and self-destructive. Study of Armenian history suggests this may be a result of genetic traits and Armenian folk culture. This is essentially why Russians feel they have to break with diplomatic protocol to talk sense into Armenians -

To be frank, it's very embarrassing for me as an Armenian to see Russians publicly explaining the above to our people. These types of talks usually takes place behind closed doors. I find it troubling that we Armenians are so emotional and out-of-touch with reality that Russians have to actually explain to us even the simplest of things. Think for a moment: Do we really need Russians to explain to us that EU membership is very dangerous for Armenia? Do we really need Russians to explain to us that Russia needs Armenia as an ally? Do we really need Russians to explain to us that Russia having good relations with Turkey and Azerbaijan is not a bad thing for Armenia? Do we really need Russians to explain to us that they are actively protecting Armenia from regional predators? These are things Russians would rather not talk about in public because it can undermine Moscow's overall regional strategy. This kind of talk therefore has the potential to adversely effect Moscow's relations with Baku. The fact that Russiansfeel the need to do so is proof that Armenians are politically ignorant and out-of-tough with reality. It's also proof that the pursuit of democracy in a place like Armenia is a toxic affair.

I think Syria
should have shown the entire world, but us Armenians in particular, the importance of having the Russian Bear on the
global arena today. Recent developments in the Middle East should have again reminded us Armenians of the cruel and unforgiving nature of the region
in which Armenia is unfortunately located in. A reminder to our westernized Russophobes and nationalist chobans: Armenia's
neighbors are not Italians, Greeks, Spaniards, Danes, Germans, Poles or Swedes. Armenia's neighborsTurks, Azeris, Kurds, Iranians, Islamists and backstabbing
Georgians. Any degree of "independence" from Russia will automatically, by-default, increase Armenia's dependence on its Turkic/Islamic neighbors.Armenia therefore does not need "independence" from Russia. Speaking of "independence from Russia", I ask: What has independence from Russia gotten Ukrainians and Georgians? After its Western-financed Maidan, Ukraine is economically much worst off, Kiev has no chance of joining NATO or the EU, Crimea has been reunited with Russia, south-eastern Ukraine is a war zone and thousands of Ukrainians have died as a result. After theWestern-backed dictator came to power in Tbilisi in 2003, Georgia lost 20% of its territory, poverty and emigration is still a major problem and Turks areeverywhere-

Kiev and Tbilisi are in terrible situations today. Despite enjoying very good relations with Turks and Azeris; despite enjoying very good relations with Western powers; despite enjoying full access to the Black Sea, Ukraine and Georgia today are hurting economically, politically and demographically - essentially because they ruined their relationship with the Russian Bear essentially to blindly appease Western powers. Now, I ask my Armenian readers to imagine
how much worst it would have been for Armenia had it also fallen victim to its pro-Westernactivists and politicians. I ask: How well would have "independence" from Russia work out for our tiny, impoverished, remote, landlocked
and blockaded nation surrounded by Turks and Muslims? Can't even think of it.

Simply put: No Russia in Armenia means no Armenia in the south Caucasus. Armenians need Russian boots on the ground in Armenia as much as Armenians need statehood. At the end of the day, Russia is the only choice and only hope Armenia has in the south Caucasus. I say only hope because, if God forbid Armenia is ever threatened by a much larger power in the region, the only nation that is ready and willing to come to its aid is the Russian nation. After Armenians, Russians are the only nation on earth that would willingly spill blood for Armenia. Itis not me saying these things, Russians themselves have been saying this for many years.

In an article appearing in Russia Today, Mikhail Aleksandrov, a political
analyst working for the Institute of CIS made the following comment
about Moscow's military presence inside Armenia -

The men I quoted above couldn't be more candid or more accurate in their assessments of the current geopolitical situation in the south Caucasus, nor could they have been more pro-Armenian in their sentiments. These men basically outlined the 0geostrategic importance of Russia's presence in the south Caucasus, as well as Armenia's strategic importance in the eyes of Kremlin officials. More importantly, the rhetoric expressed by these men is similar to the kind of rhetoric we often hear expressed by American officials about the Zionist state. Regardless of what weapons Russians sell to whom, the quotes I outlined above is more-or-less the prevailing pro-Armenian political culture in Moscow today.Russia today is a very fertile ground in which Armenians can but are not promoting their country's interests. I suggest we stop admiring Jews for their political acumen and start acting like them.

We Armenians need to be farsighted enough and intelligent enough to begin exploiting the opportunity the Russian Federation is providing us. We need to be lobbying Armenian matters in the Kremlin as obsessively and as persistently as we pursue Armenian Genocide recognition in the United States.We need to be cultivating
deeper Russian-Armenian relations. We need to
be laying
the foundations of a permanent Armenian presence within the highest
offices of the Kremlin. While Armenia's military may be its
tactical advantage on the battlefield, Armenia's presence within the walls of the Kremlin must be made its strategic advantage on the global chessboard. We therefore should
not be giving any of Uncle Sam's whores in Armenia a political platform to spew
their dangerous agendas. We should not allow modern slave-masters such
as the IMF, World Bank or the USAID or troublemakers such a George Soros funded organizations any foothold inside Armenia.

I reiterate: Russian officials see Armenia in the same way Western powers see Israel. Similar to Jews in the United States, the Armenian Diaspora in Russia is by-far the largest and most affluent in the world. Armenians are disproportionately represented in the highest layers of Russian society -

Sergei Lavrov (Foreign Minister of Russia)

Artur Chilingarov (Duma spokesman, Scientist, Hero of Russia)

Sergey Avakyants (commander of Russia's Pacific Fleet)

Margarita Simonyan (director of Russia Today, married to film director Tigran Keosayan)

Gagik Gevorkyan (president of Estet Jewelry House and new head of the prestigious Russian Jewelers Guild)

Artur Janibekyan (television producer and head of Russia's most successful Comedy Club)

Ara Abrahamyan (billionaire businessman, president of the Union of Armenians in Russia)

There are many, manymore Armenians in prominentpositionsthroughout the Russian Federation. As I have been saying for over ten years now, Armenians
can be in Moscow what Jews are in Washington DC. What's more, I agree with Alexsei
Arbatov when he says: Armenia is more important to Russia than Israel is to the United States. Without an
Armenia, Russia's position in the already volatile Caucasus will be seriously compromised. The disappearance of Israel, on the other hand, will have no tangible effects on the United States. In fact, the United States can do much better globally without the Israeli or Jewish monkey on its back. If the United States is closer to Israel than Russia is to Armenia, it's onlybecause American Jews are farsighted enough and intelligent enough to have concentrated all their efforts in recent decades on manipulating American officials into adopting an "Israel first" policy.In stark contrast to Jews, we Armenians, numbering in the millions in Russia and representedin the highest layers of Russian society, engage in virtually no lobbying efforts inside the Kremlin.

The desire to maintain a close relationship with Western powers - essentially for financial handouts - has made official Yerevan neglect its ties with Moscow. Azerbaijan and Turkey on the other hand have been doing their utmost best to lobby Russian officials. The indifference Armenian officials show in regards to Armenia's relations with Russia is very alarming. In the following two television interviews we see Chairman of Union of Armenians in Russia Ara Abrahamyan and former Armenian National Security Council Secretary Arthur Baghdasaryan raising the alarm about the lack of Armenian lobbying efforts inside Moscow and the inability of official Yerevan today to efficiently exploit its strategic relationship with Moscow -

Amazingly,
Armenia, a nation today that is desperately dependent on Russia and to a lesser extent Iran for survival,
is not actively engaging in any form of organized lobbying efforts in Moscow or Tehran!It seems that Armenians are too busy searching for US dollars and Mercedes-Benzs in the Western world. And they say Armenians are smart?!?!?! In any case, there is at last some good news to report. Within days after Vladimir Solovyov's complaints about the absence of Armenian political activity in Moscow, official Yerevan finally decided to make some long overdue changes -

Finally! I have been advocating organized Armenian lobbying efforts in Moscow for well over ten years now. I guess we needed to hear it from them first. But just think about this for a moment. It was Russians themselves that noticed a void in Armenian diplomacy in Moscow and felt compelled to tell us that we needed to do something about it. Doesn't that say a lot?! Doesn't that suggest Russians are actually concerned about Armenia well being? Doesn't that reveal just how politically incompetentwe Armenians tend to be? It's so damn embarrassing for me that we had to waituntil a Russian came to our country to tell us something we ourselvesshould have easily, quickly figured out some twenty-five years ago.Nevertheless, better late than never.

But, being that Armenians will remain politically illiterate and out-of-touch with reality, I am under no illusions. Chances are that a majority of Armenians will simply continue concentrating on doing their best to kiss the asses of Western officials either for easy money (bribesdisguised as financial aid) or for genocide recognition - with the help of homosexuals nonetheless. Chances are, Armenians by-in-large will continue neglecting the promotion of Armenian interests in Russia, as well as in Iran and China. In other words, Western officials will continue having an easy time of manipulating and exploiting Armenians by keeping our self-destructive peasantry preoccupied with nonsense like gay rights, feminism, civil society, free speech and free elections. But allow me to remind the reader once more:While they keep out idiots preoccupied with their bullshit, their ultimate plan is to keep Armenia politically isolated and economically backward. It would therefore be wise to look past the lofty rhetoric of professional mercenaries and street whores serving Western powers throughout Armenian society and instead assess their words and actions within the following geostrategic context -

The
ultimate goal of high-level Western officials continues to be either
the strangling of
Armenia (through their NATO blockade) and/or severing it from Russia.Thus,
it could
be said
that the West's ultimate intention is
to either destroy Armenia or place it under the mercy of their Turkic
and Islamic allies. After all, the primary reason why Western powers are in the
south Caucasus to begin with is to push Russia and to a lesser extent Iran out of the region so that their economic/energy interests can
exploit
Central Asian gas and oil without Moscow's meddling. Western powers realize
that without Russia in the picture in the Caucasus, the strategic region will be their playground. We Armenians however need to be sober enough to realize that without a Russian presence in Armeniathere won't
be an Armenian presence in the south Caucasus.

Any Armenian todaythat wants "independence" from Russia or wants to shutdown Russia's military bases in Armeniais a filthy traitor to Armenia regardless of his or her intention. Regarding Russia's military presence in Armenia, I can say it is the single most important factor contributing to Armenia's existence as a nation state in the south Caucasus; it is the only deterence Armenia's has against regional predators like Turkey. Intelligentpeople understand this -

With a major war looming on the horizon this is the time to stick as close to the Bear as possible. I would like to repeat once more that Armenia's ties to Russia is immeasurably more important to the Armenian state's survival in the south Caucasus than Armenia'sties to the Armenian Diaspora. Moreover, lobbying Armenian interests in Moscow in my opinion is incalculably more important to Armenia's long-term welfare than pursuing Armenian Genocide recognition in the Western world.I realize these words may be very difficultfor most Armenians to digest. But this is our reality today. Disregard
the nonsense spewed by our Western-financed mercenaries, lunatics posing as nationalist and disgusting Russophobes and recognize a certain, albeit uncomfortable reality when it comes to Armenia. The Russian presence in the south Caucasus has been the fundamental historic reason behind why we
have
an Armenia today and will continue to have an Armenia tomorrow. In other words, had Ivan not come down to the south
Caucasus some two hundred years ago - and stayed - our nationalistic Russophobes today would still be herding
goats or making donkey saddles in the mountains of eastern Turkey or northern Iran.Allow
me to put all this in an another way to help the reader better understand:
Imagine the south Caucasus as a political/economic table where Russians, Armenians, Persians, Georgians, Turks,
Azeris, Islamists and Anglo-American-Jewish energy
interests sit and discuss various regional matters. Now imagine this table without
its Russian occupant. In another words, imagine the Caucasuswithout a
powerful Russia. Now imagine the challenges our tiny,
impoverished, remote, landlocked, inexperienced, embattled and blockaded
homeland would haveat that table. To be honest, I find it very difficult imagining an Armenian state in the South Caucasus without having a strong Russian presence in the south Caucasus. It is very troubling for me that there are many Armenian today, especially in the Diaspora, that do not understand this.So, once more: No Russia in the Caucasus means no Armenia in the Caucasus. Without Russian lordship in the south Caucasus, the region would no doubt be overrun by Turkic and/or Islamic hordes.

In closing, I call onall Armenians to take a good look at what is happening around the world today and finally recognize that the postwar political order has run its courseand that we are living though the birth pangs of a new political world.

The West is in decline. There are new powers on the rise.The Bush and Obamaadministrations proved incapable of advancing Western interests after the turn of the twenty-first century. It was during their time in power that Russia, China and Iran rose to prominence in global affairs. As a result, we have a new group of people at the control board in Washington DC. Regardless
of where President Trump and company takes the country and regardless of what happens between United States and Russia, the collapse of postwar American global hegemony is now inevitable. Which is why they will do their best to prevent it or, at the very least, preserve as much of it as possible.This is essentially why we are seeing so much political and economic upheaval around the world in recent years. This is why we are seeing a growing number of conflicts. This is why we are seeing historic displacements of peoples. This is why we are seeing historic realignment of alliances. This is why we are seeing red lines being drawn by various powers.This is why I believe the
Trump administration will be tasked with leading the Anglo-American-Jewish alliance and its friends into a war. This war could be sparked in a number of places. Syria, Lebanon, Iran
and/or Yemen are the most likely places in my opinion.

The messwe are in today may go on for many more years to come. During this time, armed conflicts will intermittently ignite in various hot-spots around the world. Their intensity willebb and flow. As we have seen in places like the Ukraine, Afghanistan, Syria and Iraq in recent years, major powers will have limited exposure on the battlefield, as most of the bloodletting will be done by theirs proxies.In the end, perhaps a decade or more from today, the 20th century world order will be dead. Some nations will have died in the process, some nations will have been born. In the end, however, we will have a new world order.What this new political order will look like is anyone's guess at this time. But it is very likely that Anglo-American-Jews will no longer enjoy global hegemony thereafter. In other words, after this mess is over Western powers will no longer be sitting alone at top of the global food chain.

The coming years may therefore bring with it terrible tribulation to the region where Armenia is located. The fires that are currently burning and the fires that may yet be set in the coming years are dangerously close to Armenia. It would be wise to also understand that the risks Yerevan faces from virtually every side of the geopolitical compass today lessens with a powerful Russian presence inside Armenia. The only way Armenia can survive in an unforgiving place like the south Caucasus and in dangerous times such as this is by remaining as close to the Russian Bear as possible.

With the region where Armenia is located growing more violate with every passing
day Armenians can never lose sight of the fact that Russia is critically
important to Armenia'ssurvival as a nation-state in the south Caucasus. We should never forget that
Russia has been and will continue being the alpha
and the omega of Caucasus. We should also never forget that Armenia has been in the "Russian world" for the past two hundred years, and we need to find comfort in knowing that Armenia will continue being in the Russian world for well into the foreseeable future. For better or for worst, Armenia is wed to Russia. For
the foreseeable future, or for as long as the Caucasus region retains its Turkic and Islamic demographic and continues to be coveted by Western powers, Armenia will remain within Russia's political orbit and under
Russia's protective military umbrella. Russia and Armenia will continue being natural allies. The prudent thing for Armenians to do at this juncture in history is to learn to navigate the turbulent waters of the south Caucasus recognizing the aforementioned geopolitical truths.Recognizing these truths, embracing these realities and exploiting it all as a historic opportunity will not only help Armenia survive the times but also thrive.We
must therefore put an end to our biases, political ignorance and
emotional handicaps and for once recognize that Russia presents a historic opportunity we as a people need to collectivelywork to derive benefits from.ArevordiSpring, 2017

***

Why Trump may already be playing the evil game of the US deep state, without even knowing it

It may looks 'utterly bizarre' the fact that Donald Trump seeks good relations with Russia, but threatens China, as John Pilger mentioned, but it all makes sense finally when you see the whole picture. If your goal is to crush your two biggest rivals, you won't risk doing it simultaneously to both. Which means that, you have to keep some minimum balance. If you behave with an extremely provoking, hostile attitude against the one (China), you have to be very friendly with the other (Russia). And that's exactly what Trump does right now! It is certain that the establishment mechanisms have studied deeply Trump's persona (they knew him already actually), so that the media can 'play' with him as they please. Therefore, at the time when media focus on Trump, giving him space to perform another 'anti-establishment' show, Obama, in his last days in presidency, proceeds in the most aggressive moves against Russia (troops in Poland and Norway). Putin is not risking to retaliate seriously because he knows that Obama is leaving and, obviously, hopes that Trump will cancel these hostile moves. Our guess is that it won't happen.

At the same time, Trump is extremely hostile to China, provoking the angry reactions of the Chinese officials. He uses the known narrative that 'China is stealing the US jobs' το justify his anti-Chinese behavior, but in reality, he worries mostly about the aggressive Chinese economic expansion which threatens the US big capital interests. The establishment is pushing so much Trump to declare obedience to the anti-Russian agenda that even Putin starts to defend him openly. And while he does that, he must be making the Chinese more angry and worried. So, here is a good start for the break up of the Sino-Russian alliance. Still, our guess is that neither Putin nor the Chinese leadership will bite the bait that easily. But why the US deep state wants to start with China? Obviously because it's the major economic threat without having yet the military power of Russia. It seems that Taiwan and South China Sea are being used only as a pretext by the US to provoke China continuously. The US ultimate geopolitical interest resides in the Chinese mainland, close to the Russian borders. According to a scenario, the US starts a war that ends quickly, changes the regime in China, puts its puppet, and probably, break China (as they want to do with Russia), using disputed provinces as a pretext (e.g. Tibet, Xinjiang - No surprise that, recently, China responded instantly to Trump, saying that the 'one-China' policy is not negotiable). The US-friendly regimes will repay the US dollars that they will receive for their 'color revolutions' by allowing US military bases in their territories. With China dissolved and on its knees, Russia will be fully encircled and left with no major allies. It will be the next target. The ultimate goal of the Western neoliberal establishment would be probably to dissolve the vast Russian territory and bring in power Western-friendly puppet regimes, in order not only to conquer the valuable resources, but also to impose permanently the neoliberal doctrine in "unexplored" regions and populations. Yet, we've seen endless US failures lately. Obama completely failed to fulfill targets in Syria. Situation is still out of control in Syria/Iraq and Libya, not to mention the terrorist attacks and suicide bombings. It is probable that the evil plans of the US deep state for China and Russia will also fail, but this time things are much more serious because we are talking about two major nuclear powers. From his first moments as US president, Trump should immediately proceed in two key moves, if he wants to prove that he is not the most easily manipulated puppet of the establishment. First, withdraw troops from Eastern Europe and Norway. Second, stop provoking China and start seeking ways of cooperation for the mutual benefit of the two countries. Otherwise, the lunatics who pull his strings, may burn the whole planet through a nuclear war.

Officials say strategy marries president’s vows to improve relations with Putin and to aggressively challenge Iran’s military presence in Middle East

The Trump administration is exploring ways to break Russia’s military
and diplomatic alliance with Iran in a bid to both end the Syrian
conflict and bolster the fight against Islamic State, said senior
administration, European and Arab officials involved in the policy
discussions. The emerging strategy seeks to reconcile President Donald Trump’s seemingly contradictory vows to improve relations with Russian President Vladimir Putin and to aggressively challenge the military presence of Iran—one of Moscow’s most critical allies—in the Middle East, these officials say. A
senior administration official said the White House doesn’t have any
illusions about Russia or see Mr. Putin as a “choir boy,” despite
further conciliatory statements from Mr. Trump about the Russian leader
over the weekend. But the official said that the administration doesn’t
view Russia as the same existential threat that the Soviet Union posed
to the U.S. during the Cold War and that Mr. Trump was committed to
constraining Iran.

“If there’s a wedge to be driven between Russia and Iran, we’re willing to explore that,” the official said.

Such
a strategy doesn’t entirely explain the mixed signals Mr. Trump and his
circle have sent regarding Moscow, which have unnerved U.S. allies and
caught Republican leaders in Congress off guard. Days after the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, said a surge in violence
in eastern Ukraine demanded “clear and strong condemnation of Russian
actions,” Vice President Mike Pence suggested Sunday that Washington could lift sanctions on Moscow soon if it cooperated in the U.S. fight against Islamic State. Mr.
Trump himself spoke again about wanting to mend relations with Mr.
Putin in an interview that aired before Sunday’s Super Bowl, saying
“it’s better to get along with Russia than not.” After Fox News host Bill O’Reilly said Mr. Putin was a “killer,” the president responded: “What, you think our country’s so innocent?” But
those involved in the latest policy discussions argue there is a
specific focus on trying to drive a wedge between Russia and Iran.

“There’s
daylight between Russia and Iran for sure,” said a senior European
official who has held discussions with Mr. Trump’s National Security
Council staff in recent weeks. “What’s unclear is what Putin would
demand in return for weakening the alliance.”

But
persuading Mr.
Putin to break with Tehran would be immensely difficult and—a number of
Russian experts in Washington say—come at a heavy cost likely to
reverberate across America’s alliances with its Western partners. Nor
would Mr. Trump be the first U.S. president to pursue the strategy: The
Obama administration spent years trying to coax Russia away from Iran,
particularly in Syria, only to see the two countries intensify their
military operations there to bolster the Damascus regime. “If the
Kremlin is to reduce its arms supplies to Iran, it is likely to expect a
significant easing of sanctions,” said Dimitri Simes,
a Russia expert and president of the Center for the National Interest
in Washington. “The Russians don’t believe in free lunches.” The
Kremlin has said it aims to mend ties with the U.S. under the Trump
administration but in recent months has also signaled its intent to
continue to build on its cooperation with Iran. Moscow and Tehran
have formed a tight military alliance in Syria in recent years. The
Kremlin is a major supplier of weapons systems and nuclear equipment to
Iran. But the Trump administration is seeking to exploit what
senior U.S., European and Arab officials see as potential divisions
between Russia and Iran over their future strategy in Syria and the
broader Mideast.

“The
issue is whether Putin is prepared to abandon [Ayatollah] Khamenei,”
said Michael Ledeen, an academic who advised National Security Council
Advisor Michael Flynn
during the transition and co-wrote a book with him last year. “I think
that might be possible if he is convinced we will ‘take care’ of Iran. I
doubt he believes that today.”

Russia, Iran and Turkey have been leading talks in Kazakhstan in
recent weeks to try to end Syria’s six-year war. Participants in the
discussions, which have excluded high-level U.S. diplomats, said Russia
has appeared significantly more open than the Iranians to discussing a
future without President Bashar al-Assad. A Russian-backed
faction in the talks has promoted the creation of a new Syrian
constitution and a gradual transition away from Mr. Assad. Moscow has
pressed the Trump administration to join the talks at a high-level, an
invitation not extended while President Barack Obama was in office. Last
week, the administration sent only a lower-level official, its
ambassador to Kazakhstan. Mr.
Putin largely has succeeded in saving the regime of Mr. Assad from
collapse through a brutal air war in Syria over the past 18 months. But
the Kremlin is interested in fortifying its long-term military presence
in Syria and doesn’t necessarily view Mr. Assad as an enduring partner,
these officials said. Iran, conversely, is wholly wedded to Mr.
Assad as its primary partner for shipping weapons and funds to Iran’s
military proxies in Lebanon and the Palestinian territories, including
Hezbollah and Hamas. Any future Arab leader in Syria, even one close to
Mr. Assad, is unlikely to tie his position so closely to Tehran.

“Russia
is fully aware of the corruption and incompetence of the Assad
regime…[and] knows that a stable Syria—a country worth having military
bases in the long term—is unattainable with Assad at the helm,” said
Fred Hof, a former State Department official who oversaw Syria policy
during President Obama’s first term. He added: “Tehran knows there is no
Syrian constituency beyond Assad accepting subordination to [Iran].”

The
Obama administration also pursued a strategy of trying to woo Russia
away from Tehran. During his first term, Mr. Obama succeeded in getting
then-Russian President Dmitry Medvedev to support tough United Nations
sanctions on Iran for its nuclear activities. Moscow also delayed the
delivery of antimissile batteries to Tehran, sparking a diplomatic row
between the countries.

In return, the Obama White House rolled
back missile-defense deployments in Europe that Russia believed weakened
its strategic position. Tensions between Russia and the U.S.
flared, though, after Mr. Putin regained the presidency in 2012 and
seized the Crimean region of Ukraine in 2014. The U.S. and European
Union responded with tough financial sanctions on Mr. Putin’s inner
circle. A number of Russia experts in Washington say they believe
Mr. Putin would demand a heavy price now for any move to distance
himself from Iran. In addition to easing sanctions, they believe he
would want assurances that the U.S. would scale back its criticism of
Russia’s military operations in Ukraine and stall further expansion of
North Atlantic Treaty Organization membership for countries near the
Russian border. Montenegro is scheduled to join NATO this year. The U.S. Senate still needs to vote to approve the bid.

In
a report released Friday, the Institute for the Study of War, a
Washington think tank, cautioned that even if Moscow were to distance
itself from Tehran, it wouldn’t contain the enormous influence that Iran
wields over Syria’s economic, military, and political institutions.
“Any U.S. effort to subvert Iran’s posture in Syria through Russia will
undoubtedly end in failure,” the assessment said. Russia
delivered its S-300 antimissile system to Iran after Tehran, the U.S.
and five other world powers implemented a landmark nuclear agreement a
year ago. The Kremlin since has talked of further expanding its military
and nuclear cooperation with Tehran. Mr. Trump, though,
campaigned on improving relations with Moscow, a theme that Mr. Putin
has publicly embraced. Mr. Trump has suggested he could ease sanctions
on Russia if the Kremlin took serious steps to cooperate in fighting
Islamic State in Syria and Iraq and addressing other national security
threats to the U.S. Mr. Trump and his advisers have made clear
since assuming office that constraining Iran would be among their top
priorities. They have also privately acknowledged there is no certainty
the Kremlin will cooperate.

Last week, the administration declared Iran “on notice” and the U.S. Treasury Department imposed sanctions on
25 Iran-linked individuals and entities for their alleged roles in
aiding Iran’s ballistic missile program and terrorist activities. The
Pentagon also dispatched a naval destroyer, the USS Cole, last week to
police the waters around Yemen. The Trump administration’s show
of force has raised concerns that the U.S. and Iran could stumble into a
military conflict. But officials close to the Trump administration said
they believed the White House could gain the respect of the Kremlin if
it showed a commitment to enforcing its warnings to other governments. “Iran
has a continuing operation throughout the region…that is not
sustainable, not acceptable, and violates norms and creates
instability,” a senior U.S. official said on Friday. “Iran has to
determine its response to our actions. Iran has a choice to make.”

Russia and Iran are currently engaged in unprecedented cooperation.
Never in 500 years has the leadership of the two countries been so
close. Despite deeply rooted mistrust and a long history as rivals, a
number of common interests have brought Russia and Iran together. First
among them is the mutual geostrategic goal of zero-sum opposition to the
West, especially the United States. Russian-Iranian cooperation may be
short-lived. But in the meantime it can inflict lasting damage to U.S.
interests. It is going to be difficult to drive a wedge between Russia
and Iran in the short-term, but there are certain things the new Trump
administration could do to that end. To understand the close ties
between Russia and Iran, it's important to understand the complicated
history between the two countries.

The Grand Duchy of Muscovy,
the precursor of the modern Russian state, and Iran, then called Persia,
opened official relations in 1521. Trade was the main reason for the
relationship; both countries looked down on each other as inferior, and
thus gave little thought to expanding ties. Tsarist Russia, which
succeeded the Muscovy in 1547, and then the Russian Empire that Peter
the Great proclaimed in 1721, soon began to expand south and southeast
into Central Asia and the Caucasus. This is when Russian and Persian
interests first clashed. In 1796, Catherine the Great sent troops into
the Iranian North Caucasus, and only her death that year may have
prevented a full-scale Russian invasion.

In the 19th century,
Russia and Iran fought two wars, in 1804-1813 and 1826-1828. Iran lost
both and ceded to Russia parts of what are now Azerbaijan, Georgia,
Armenia, and Turkmenistan. The wars took a serious financial toll on
Iran and anti-Russian sentiment rose on both religious grounds and
resentment of the high cost of the war effort. In February 1829, a mob
murdered Russian ambassador Alexander Griboyedov with his staff in
Tehran. Griboyedov had helped negotiate the Treaty of Turkmenchay, which
ended the war in 1828 on what the Iranians saw as humiliating terms. A
Russian envoy would not be murdered by foreign nationals in a foreign
country again until 2016.

Despite these tensions, commercial and political interests brought
Russia and Iran together in the early 1900s. The Kremlin wanted to pull
Iran into its sphere of influence and the Iranian shah needed money,
which he began borrowing from Russia either at exorbitant rates or with
political strings attached. The Iranian public, of course, bore the
cost. This opened a rift between the Iranian government's attitude
toward Russia and that of its people -- one that remains to this day.

After the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, Soviet forces sponsored separatist
movements in Iranian territory, first in the northern Iranian province
of Gilan on the Caspian Sea and later in both Iranian Azerbaijan and
Kurdistan. In 1946, Soviet leader Josef Stalin sparked the first real
crisis of the Cold War when he briefly refused to withdraw the Red Army
from Iran in 1946. To this day, Iranians speak resentfully of the Soviet
occupation. Iranian revolutionary leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini
disdained both the U.S. and the Soviet Union. His defining slogan was
"Neither East nor West but Islamic Republic."

While the Iranian
public remained distrustful of Russia, with the end of the Iran-Iraq
War in 1988, as well as Khomeini's death and the Soviet withdrawal from
Afghanistan in 1989, some Iranian officials sought to improve ties with
Moscow on pragmatic grounds. Ayatollah Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani even
traveled to Moscow. But the Kremlin worried that Iran might export its
radical ideology to Russia's large Muslim population or foment unrest in
the Caucasus and Central Asia in order to influence Moscow -- after
all, this is the traditional Kremlin approach. Yet Tehran sided with
Moscow during Chechnya's separatist struggles in the early 1990s. Iran
also helped Moscow end Tajikistan's 1992-1997 civil war. By the end of
the '90s, despite remaining differences, Russia had emerged as Iran's
main conventional arms supplier and began assisting in its nuclear
program.

When Vladimir Putin rose to power in Russia in 2000,
he began the process of returning to the Middle East. To do so, he
worked with everyone in the region, friend and foe alike. Russia's
relationship with Iran was part of this effort.

The strategy
grew out of Putin's antagonism toward the West and its democratic
values. He viewed Russia's foreign policy as a zero-sum game against the
West and acted accordingly. He had several reasons to pursue improved
ties with Iran, but his desire to reduce Western influence and pull Iran
closer to Russia overrode all others. As Prof. Mark Katz of George
Mason University wrote,
Putin worried that then-Iranian President Mohammad Khatami's "dialogue
of civilizations" would bring Iran closer to the U.S. -- and thus out of
Russia's sphere of influence.

In October 2000, soon after
taking office, Putin publicly repealed the 1995 Gore-Chernomyrdin pact,
which limited Russia's sale of conventional arms to Iran. Press reports indicated
that in practice the agreement gave Russia "a free pass to sell
conventional weapons to Iran" until 1999, but the public cancellation of
the deal sent a message that Putin wanted closer cooperation with the
Islamic Republic.

Putin also sought to improve ties with Iran
for economic reasons. Iran was a lucrative market for Russia's military
and the arms trade and nuclear cooperation continued to expand. In
addition, the two countries shared a strong opposition to Sunni
Islamism. A tough stance against terrorism helped propel Putin into
power in March 2000 after a series of apartment bombings shook Moscow
and several other cities in September 1999. Putin immediately blamed the
Chechens and declared a second war on Chechnya, though much evidence
suggests Putin and his main intelligence service, the FSB, may have
orchestrated the attacks. In any case, Moscow's human rights abuses in
the first Chechen war had already transformed the secular Chechen separatist cause into a radical Islamist one.

The majority of Russia's Muslims are Sunni and countering Sunni
extremism was among Putin's official policies from the very beginning.
Shia Iran shared this concern. Indeed, Russian experts and officials
claim that Iran is a potentially "secular" force that can help counter
Sunni Islamism. This has led to a double standard on Sunni versus Shia
terrorism. In February 2003, for example, Russia's Supreme Court
declared the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organization, while
Shia Hezbollah received no such designation. Though in practice Putin
was just as willing to work with Sunni Islamists as anyone else, he took
a different stance domestically.

Of course, difficulties
remained in the Russia-Iran relationship. Since 2006, Moscow has sought
to dilute sanctions against Iran. For its part, Iran would have
preferred Russia did not support sanctions at all. Tehran also felt
snubbed when, under pressure from the U.S. and Israel, Moscow froze the
sale of S-300 air defense missiles to Iran in 2010.

In 2013,
however, Russian-Iranian cooperation rose to an entirely new level as
the two countries' political interests converged more than ever before.

In 2012, Putin began a third presidential term amidst massive protests
against him and his United Russia party. Putin launched a domestic
crackdown and blamed the U.S. State Department for "giving a signal"
to protestors to take to the streets. He could not even fathom the
possibility that people could protest independently. Fear that domestic
protest can break out anywhere, anytime now guides much of his domestic
policy, which goes hand-in-hand with his foreign policy. In Russia the
line between the two is blurred to a degree that is hard to imagine in
the West.

Putin believes that the West is behind all protests
in the post-Soviet sphere and the Middle East, and that he is next. This
is one of the main reasons why he has supported the Assad regime in
Syria at all costs. This in turn brought Moscow especially close to
Tehran. Putin believes he is in a stronger position to confront the West
in the Middle East if he is allied with Iran.

Russia also
emerged as a strong voice in the P5+1 group that negotiated the nuclear
deal with Iran, especially in the context of Western retreat from the
Middle East. Putin pursued his own self-interest in regard to the talks:
A deal with Iran would open more possibilities for cooperation. On the
one hand, Russia would prefer a non-nuclear Iran; it hardly needed
convincing to participate in talks to curb Tehran's nuclear program. On
the other hand, Moscow felt less threatened by the program than the
West, and ultimately puts its desire to counter the West above all. It
may make little sense from a Western perspective, but Moscow often
ignores real threats and elevates imaginary ones -- hence its obsession
with a perceived threat from NATO.

Russia and Iran also shared a
concern about the resurgence of the Taliban in Afghanistan following
President Obama's plans to draw down U.S. troops by 2014. Ironically,
Putin wanted the U.S. to remain in Afghanistan more than the U.S. wanted
to -- albeit on Putin's terms. Russia and Iran were impacted by
narcotrafficking coming out of Afghanistan and viewed the Taliban, which
is traditionally both anti-Shia and anti-Russian, as a potential enemy.

In spring 2013, according to Russian sources, Russian and Iranian officials discussed
the idea of Tehran joining the Moscow-led Eurasian Customs Union at a
seminar in Tehran titled "Iran and Regional Cooperation in Eurasia."
Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi attended the event and
reportedly spoke of Iran's usefulness to the development and expansion
of Eurasianism -- Putin's alternative vision to Western liberalism. The
Customs Union in particular, and the Eurasian Economic Union that
followed it in 2014, are part of Putin's effort to counterbalance the
European Union. This may have been just talk, but that the conversation
took place at all is significant. Putin never offered to allow any Arab
country to join the Customs Union, and Iran was never part of the Soviet
Union, as were the other member countries.

In March 2014,
Moscow annexed Crimea and began destabilizing activities in Eastern
Ukraine. The U.S. and Europe imposed sanctions on Russia in response.
U.S.-Russian relations plunged to the lowest levels since the Cold War,
intensifying Putin's need for anti-Western allies. Iran fit that role
perfectly. That America's allies are traditionally Sunni only adds to
Iran's appeal.

Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu visited Iran in January 2015 and Putin visited in November -- the first such visits in at least a decade. After they met, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei praised
Putin for "neutralizing Washington's plots." Putin again brought up the
issue of Iranian cooperation with the Customs Union, offered a $5
billion line of credit, and discussed expansion of bilateral trade. He
also highlighted
Iran's positive role as a "trustworthy and reliable ally,"
demonstrating once again his true priority of pulling Iran into his
sphere of influence. Indeed, Russian Middle East expert Georgiy Mirsky wrote
in his blog on the liberal website Echo Moskvy, "Several years ago, I
heard from the lips of one MIA [Ministry of Internal Affairs] employee
such reasoning: 'For us, a pro-American Iran is worse than a nuclear
Iran.'" Putin and Iranian President Hassan Rouhani have met several
times since 2015, as have their ministers and aides. Subsequent
high-level meetings followed and are now almost routine.

As
negotiations on the nuclear deal gained traction, the Kremlin
highlighted Russia's indispensable role in them. When the agreement was
signed in July 2015, Putin praised the deal and emphasized Russia's participation in the process, while the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs tweeted
that the accord was "based on the approach articulated by President
Vladimir Putin." The ink had barely dried on the accord when Putin
lifted the freeze on the S-300 sale and deliveries began in April 2015,
despite Israel's concerns. In June 2016, Putin called
for Iran's admission to the Shanghai Cooperation Organization,
something -- just as with the Customs Union -- he had never done for any
Arab state.

In August 2016, Moscow took the world -- and many
in Iran -- by surprise when it reportedly used Iran's Hamadan airbase to
bomb targets in Syria. The last time a foreign power had based itself
in Iran was during World War II. Russian media was awash with praise for
Russia-Iran anti-terrorism cooperation. In the context of public
outrage in Iran, Iranian Defense Minister Hossein Dehghan accused Moscow of "ungentlemanly" behavior for publicizing its use of the base. Nonetheless, Iranian Parliament Speaker Ali Larijani said
only days afterwards that "The flights [of Russian warplanes] haven't
been suspended. Iran and Russia are allies in the fight against
terrorism," though the Hamedan air base, he claimed, was only "used for
refueling."

The following month, Putin said that it would be "just" if Iran reached pre-sanctions level of oil production. In November, he began discussing a $10 billion arms deal. In late December, discussions on Iranian admission to the Customs Union continued. A number of Russian sources reported that Iran hopes to move closer to the Union and benefit
from free trade with its members. In the same month, Rouhani travelled
to Armenia -- a Customs Union member -- ostensibly to improve ties, and
signed a number of agreements. It was Rouhani's first visit to Armenia
as president. The traditionally more liberal-oriented press outlet
Nezavisimaya Gazeta suggested
that Armenia might tie Iran to the Customs Union. While it remains
unclear whether this will happen, it is significant that the issue
remains on the table.

When it comes to the Iranian view of Russia, sources report
that the two countries agree on terrorism-related issues and Iran sees
Russia's policies in Syria as "wise." Recently, Russian press outlet
Izvestiya wrote that,
reflecting on the past year, it was Russia that always spoke out for
lifting sanctions and maintained dialogue with Tehran. Iranian cinema
made its way into Europe, the article claims, because it was widely
shown at Russian film festivals. The article concludes, "Dialogue
between the two countries has not been interrupted even for a minute.
And it is this fact that gives reason for optimism -- whatever the
complexities may be, Russia and Iran will find a reason for friendship."

At the moment, it is going to be difficult to drive a wedge
between Russia and Iran. Too many interests hold them together and they
are likely to continue to put historical mistrust aside even as Tehran's
persistent and historically-justified fears that Moscow will throw Iran
under the bus continue to undermine the relationship.

From
Moscow's perspective, the U.S. has been and will continue to be an
enemy, no matter how hard any U.S. president tries to improve relations.
Putin needs the U.S. as an enemy to justify domestic problems at home
and he sees the current geopolitical order, anchored by the U.S., as
disadvantaging him. Nothing short of a rearrangement of that order will
satisfy Putin. Nobel Prize-winning author and journalist Svetlana
Alexievich observed
in October 2015 that Russians "are people of war. We don't have any
other history. Either we were preparing for war or we were fighting one.
And so all of this militarism has pushed all of our psychological
buttons at once." Putin needs allies who share this worldview.

President Trump expressed two contradictory policies during his
campaign: being tough on Iran and improving relations with Russia. These
two goals are incompatible because Putin wants a partnership with Trump
in Syria, but Syria is where Putin is most closely allied with Iran. In
order to push Iran and Russia apart, Trump needs to resolve this
contradiction. The recent Syria peace talks in Kazakhstan only brought
Russia and Iran closer together,
if anything, given their pledge to fight "jointly" against ISIS and
al-Qaeda-affiliated Jabhat Fateh al-Sham. This development will also
make it even more difficult for Trump to ally with Russia on Syria.

So far, Putin has succeeded in balancing Israeli and Sunni interests
with its growing relationship with Iran. But it is unclear how long
Putin can sustain this policy. Certainly, Putin did not hesitate to
discount Israel's interests when it came to selling S-300 weapons to
Iran. Indeed, it is not in Israel's interest for Putin to continue
supporting Bashar al-Assad and thereby expand Iran's influence in the
Middle East. The Trump administration could encourage and support U.S.
allies like Israel in order to make it more difficult for Putin to
maintain his balance of good relations with all sides. It should also
step up security cooperation with its allies to demonstrate that it is
still committed to the region.

In the long term, Russia and
Iran diverge somewhat on Syria. Iran perceives Syria as within its
sphere of influence, which is not very different from how Putin views
the former Soviet Union countries that he does not consider real states.
Iran is interested in exacerbating
sectarian divisions in Syria so that the Assad regime becomes an
Iranian client-state with no independent decision-making. Iran is also
closer to Assad himself than Putin, who simply wants Assad or someone
else like him to ensure his interests in Syria. He cares more about how
he can leverage Syria in his relations with the West than Syria itself.
At the same time, Putin also increasingly perceives the Middle East as
falling within the Russian sphere of influence, albeit differently than
Iran. Historically, Moscow always looked for buffer zones out of its
sense of insecurity, and this is precisely how it feels now.

The Trump administration could emphasize to Putin that Russian and
Iranian interests in Syria are bound to clash in the future, and
therefore an alliance with Iran can only go so far. But most of all, the
U.S. needs to be present in the region and regain its leadership
position. Putin preys on weakness and has perceived the U.S. as weak for
years. He stepped into a vacuum in the Middle East, especially in
Syria, that was created by America's absence. By taking an active role
in the region, the U.S. would limit Putin's influence, including his
alliance with Iran.

Is the Trump administration embarked on a foreign policy of
driving a strategic wedge between Russia, China, and Iran? Given the
precedent set by the Nixon-Kissinger strategy of the 1970s vis-à-vis
Russia and China, the question is pertinent. Trump’s foreign policy
since he assumed office can be boiled down to the simple, if not
simplistic, proposition of peace with Russia and conflict with China and
Iran. The problem with such a policy, of course, is that any conflict
with China or Iran will make peace with Russia hard to achieve given
that both are longstanding allies and partners of Moscow, and therefore
would place Russia in a difficult position. Regardless, there are
those who continue to project faith in Trump based on nothing more
concrete than the fact he isn’t Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton. This is
political illiteracy of the most basic sort, especially in light of the
maiden speech
of the new president’s Ambassador to the UN, Nikki Haley, to the
Security Council over the resumption of conflict in eastern Ukraine.

“The United States continues to condemn and calls for an immediate end to the Russian occupation of Crimea,” Haley said. “Crimea
is a part of Ukraine. Our Crimea-related sanctions will remain in place
until Russia returns control over the peninsula to Ukraine.”

They are words that could have been lifted verbatim from any number
of speeches delivered to the UN Security Council by Haley’s predecessor,
Samantha Power. They reveal the Trump administration is intent on
continuing the lie that Crimea was ripped from Ukraine against the will
of the overwhelming majority of its citizens, and that the Ukrainian
government in Kiev has legal authority over those who refuse to accept
the legitimacy of the coup, backed by the US and its European allies,
which brought it to power in 2014.

Turning to China, the school of
thought which contends that Trump is merely setting out a hard
bargaining position to reboot trade relations between Beijing and
Washington on terms more favorable to the latter is delusional. It is a
position that fails to take into account that China is currently preparing
for the possibility of military conflict against the US in the near
future. Understandably so given Trump’s saber rattling over the ongoing
territorial dispute in the South China Sea, and understandably so given
Trump’s statement that the One China Policy,
under which Washington accepts Beijing’s strongly held position that
Taiwan is a breakaway province of China rather than an independent
state, may be up for negotiation. Predictably, the prospect has gone
down like the proverbial lead balloon in the Chinese capital. East Asia,
before Trump’s election, was already a region where tensions had been
intensifying in recent years, reflected in a sharp increase in spending on defense by China and Japan, along with Singapore, South Korea, and Vietnam.

When it comes to Trump’s claim
that China is guilty of currency manipulation, it is evident he is
living in an upside down world. How has the United States been able to
maintain an economic model supported by otherwise unsustainable debt and
hyper-consumption if not for the manipulation of its currency? Indeed
if it was not for the US dollar’s status as the world’s dominant
international reserve currency, and if not for China being willing to
buy so many of them, the US economy would have collapsed way before now.
Yes, the US has been China’s biggest export market over the years, but
the relatively low cost of Chinese imports has helped keep the cost of
living down for Americans, especially during the worst years of the
global recession, thus enabling them to continue the hyper level of
consumption that is key to the US economy.

Rather than devaluing its currency, China has been doing precisely the opposite, offloading
US Treasury Bonds over the past year to increase the value of its
currency, the yuan, against the dollar. Whether Beijing’s motives in
doing so are entirely economic, or if there is a strategic motive
involved, given that the US economy is vulnerable in this regard, this
is hard to say with certitude. But considering the ongoing territorial
dispute, previously mentioned, and China’s growing concern over the
build-up of US naval resources in the region, it would be naïve to
discount one. When it comes to Iran, the Trump administration is
determined to join with Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in
placing pressure on a country that has been a solid pole of opposition
to both Israeli expansionism and US hegemony in the region over many
years. Trump’s National Security Advisor, Michael Flynn, recently threatened Iran in response to a missile test that was undertaken, accusing the country of engaging in “destabilizing behavior across the Middle East.”

It is utter nonsense. The states in the region that are most guilty of “destabilizing behavior”
are Israel and Saudi Arabia, both longstanding allies of Washington,
whose consistent rattling of sabers toward Tehran is the real cause of
rising tensions. Furthermore, Saudi Arabia’s actions in Yemen are an
offense to any conception of legality or justice, yet in response,
Washington continues to turn a blind eye.Michael Flynn, it should
be noted, had already been labeled an Islamophobe prior to being
appointed Trump’s National Security Advisor. In a video of a speech he gave last year, the National Security Advisor described Islam as a “malignant cancer.”

His ignorance in this regard is both astounding and horrifying,
especially when we consider Washington’s role in slaughtering and
destroying the lives of millions of Muslims in recent years, its role in
destroying Iraq, Libya, and turning the entire region into a mess. The
Salafi-jihadist menace that erupted in response has killed more Muslims
than members of any other religious or cultural group, and it is Muslims
who have been doing the bulk of the fighting on the ground in
resistance to it – specifically the Muslim-majority Iraqi Army, Syrian
Army, Iranian volunteers, Hezbollah, Kurds, and so on.President
Trump’s first few weeks in office have provided enough evidence that it
is far too soon to place faith in him ending a Washington foreign policy
predicated on US exceptionalism.

Returning to the question posed
in the opening chapter, what Russia has to consider when it comes to the
foreign policy of the Trump administration at this early stage is the
high probability of it being driven by the desire to weaken or indeed
split the Shanghai Cooperation Organization
(SCO), of which Russia and China are founding members. The
Nixon-Kissinger strategy of the early 1970s resulted in the United
States normalizing relations with China to capitalize on the Sino-Soviet split, thus driving a wedge between both to Washington’s strategic advantage. Back
then the strategy worked superbly from Washington’s point of view.
Allowing it to do so a second time, and this time allowing the US to
normalize relations with Moscow at the expense of Beijing, would
constitute a historical blunder of monumental proportions from the
standpoint not only of China but also Russia.

Kissinger to Advise Trump on Bridging Gaps With Russia to offset China

Former US State Secretary Henry Kissinger has a plan on how to reconcile Moscow and Washington that is of interest to US President-elect Donald Trump, a secret report seen by German media shows. The analysis of information, obtained by western European intelligence from Trump’s transition team and cited by the Bild newspaper, revealed Monday the White House would go for a "constructive cooperation" with the Kremlin. Kissinger has reportedly met with Trump several times in the past couple of months and is rumored to be his informal foreign policy adviser. The veteran diplomat, who served as secretary of state under presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, has spelled out how to bring the United States and Russia closer together to offset China’s military buildup. Some of the steps include recognizing Russia’s dominance in former Soviet republics, such as Ukraine, Belarus, Georgia and Kazakhstan, as well as closing the eyes on Crimea and lifting sanctions from Russia in exchange for its pullout from eastern Ukraine, where it allegedly has troops. US-Russian relations deteriorated under President Barack Obama. During his election campaign, Trump repeatedly pledged to undo Obama’s legacy and mend ties with Moscow. He is to be sworn in as president on January 20.

The English language Russian news agency, Sputnik, reports that former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger is advising US president-elect Donald Trump how to “bring the United States and Russia closer together to offset China’s military buildup.” If we take this report at face value, it tells us that Kissinger, an old cold warrior, is working to use Trump’s commitment to better relations with Russia in order to separate Russia from its strategic alliance with China.

China’s military buildup is a response to US provocations against China and US claims to the South China Sea as an area of US national interests. China does not intend to attack the US and certainly not Russia. Kissinger, who was my colleague at the Center for Strategic and International studies for a dozen years, is aware of the pro-American elites inside Russia, and he is at work creating for them a “China threat” that they can use in their effort to lead Russia into the arms of the West. If this effort is successful, Russia’s sovereignty will be eroded exactly as has the sovereignty of every other country allied with the US.

At President Putin’s last press conference, journalist Marat Sagadatov asked if Russia wasn’t already subject to forms of foreign semi-domination: “Our economy, industry, ministries and agencies often follow the rules laid down by international organizations and are managed by consulting companies. Even our defense enterprises have foreign consulting firms auditing them.” The journalist asked, “if it is not time to do some import substitution in this area too?”

Every Russian needs to understand that being part of the West means living by Washington’s rules. The only country in the Western Alliance that has an independent foreign and economic policy is the US. All of us need to understand that although Trump has been elected president, the neoconservatives remain dominant in US foreign policy, and their commitment to the hegemony of the US as the uni-power remains as strong as ever. The neoconservative ideology has been institutionalized in parts of the CIA, State Department and Pentagon. The neoconservatives retain their influence in media, think tanks, university faculties, foundations, and in the Council on Foreign Relations.

We also need to understand that Trump revels in the role of tough guy and will say things that can be misinterpreted as my friend, Finian Cunningham, whose columns I read, usually with appreciation, might have done.

I do not know that Trump will prevail over the vast neoconservative conspiracy. However, it seems clear enough that he is serious about reducing the tensions with Russia that have been building since President Clinton violated the George H. W. Bush administration’s promise that NATO would not expand one inch to the East. Unless Trump were serious, there is no reason for him to announce Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson as his choice for Secretary of State. In 2013 Mr. Tillerson was awarded Russia’s Order of Friendship.

As Professor Michel Chossudovsky has pointed out, a global corporation such as Exxon has interests different from those of the US military/security complex. The military/security complex needs a powerful threat, such as the former “Soviet threat” which has been transformed into the “Russian threat,” in order to justify its hold on an annual budget of approximately one trillion dollars. In contrast, Exxon wants to be part of the Russian energy business. Therefore, as Secretary of State, Tillerson is motivated to achieve good relations between the US and Russia, whereas for the military/security complex good relations undermine the orchestrated fear on which the military/security budget rests.

Clearly, the military/security complex and the neoconservatives see Trump and Tillerson as threats, which is why the neoconservatives and the armaments tycoons so strongly opposed Trump and why CIA Director John Brennan made wild and unsupported accusations of Russian interference in the US presidential election.

The lines are drawn. The next test will be whether Trump can obtain Senate confirmation of his choice of Tillerson as Secretary of State. The myth is widespread that President Reagan won the cold war by breaking the Soviet Union financially with an arms race. As one who was involved in Reagan’s effort to end the cold war, I find myself yet again correcting the record. Reagan never spoke of winning the cold war. He spoke of ending it. Other officials in his government have said the same thing, and Pat Buchanan can verify it.

Reagan wanted to end the Cold War, not win it. He spoke of those “godawful” nuclear weapons. He thought the Soviet economy was in too much difficulty to compete in an arms race. He thought that if he could first cure the stagflation that afflicted the US economy, he could force the Soviets to the negotiating table by going through the motion of launching an arms race. “Star wars” was mainly hype. (Whether or nor the Soviets believed the arms race threat, the American leftwing clearly did and has never got over it.)

Reagan had no intention of dominating the Soviet Union or collapsing it. Unlike Clinton, George W. Bush, and Obama, he was not controlled by neoconservatives. Reagan fired and prosecuted the neoconservatives in his administration when they operated behind his back and broke the law.

The Soviet Union did not collapse because of Reagan’s determination to end the Cold War. The Soviet collapse was the work of hardline communists, who believed that Gorbachev was loosening the Communist Party’s hold so quickly that Gorbachev was a threat to the existence of the Soviet Union and placed him under house arrest. It was the hardline communist coup against Gorbachev that led to the rise of Yeltsin. No one expected the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The US military/security complex did not want Reagan to end the Cold War, as the Cold War was the foundation of profit and power for the complex. The CIA told Reagan that if he renewed the arms race, the Soviets would win, because the Soviets controlled investment and could allocate a larger share of the economy to the military than Reagan could.

Reagan did not believe the CIA’s claim that the Soviet Union could prevail in an arms race. He formed a secret committee and gave the committee the power to investigate the CIA’s claim that the US would lose an arms race with the Soviet Union. The committee concluded that the CIA was protecting its prerogatives. I know this because I was a member of the committee.

American capitalism and the social safety net would function much better without the drain on the budget of the military/security complex. It is more correct to say that the military/security complex wants a major threat, not an actual arms race. Stateless Muslim terrorists are not a sufficient threat for such a massive US military, and the trouble with an actual arms race as opposed to a threat is that the US armaments corporations would have to produce weapons that work instead of cost overruns that boost profits.

The latest US missile ship has twice broken down and had to be towed into port. The F-35 has cost endless money, has a variety of problems and is already outclassed. The Russian missiles are hypersonic. The Russian tanks are superior. The explosive power of the Russian Satan II ICBM is terrifying. The morale of the Russian forces is high. They have not been exhausted from 15 years of fighting without much success pointless wars against women and children. Washington, given the corrupt nature of the US military/security complex, can arms race all it wants without being a danger to Russia or China, much less to the strategic alliance between the two powers.

The neoconservatives are discredited, but they are still a powerful influence on US foreign policy. Until Trump relegates them to the ideological backwaters, Russia and China had best hold on to their strategic alliance. Anyone attempting to break this alliance is a threat to both Russia and China, and to America and to life on earth.

Trump will try to smash the China-Russia-Iran triangle ... here’s why he will fail

The
hand of Henry Kissinger suggests US foreign policy will use a ‘divide
and rule’ strategy with Beijing, Moscow and Tehran. But this could
backfire, spectacularly

China,
Russia and Iran are the three key players in what promises to be the
Eurasian Century. Donald Trump may be The Joker; The Fool; The Ace of
Spades; the ultimate trickster. What nobody can tell for sure is how
this shifty chameleon will seduce, cajole, divide and threaten these
three countries in his bid to “Make America Great Again”. Considering
the composition of his cabinet, as well as his motormouth twittering,
the world according to Trump sees radical Islam as the No 1 threat,
followed by Iran, China and Russia. The strategy of Henry Kissinger,
Trump’s unofficial foreign policy guru, is a mix of “balance of power”
and “divide and rule”. It will consist of seducing Russia away from its
strategic partner China; keeping China constantly on a sort of red
alert; and targeting Islamic State while continuing to harass Iran.

All
this has the potential to backfire splendidly. Even a real “reset” with
Russia, of the non-Hillary Clinton kind, is not exactly assured.
Trump’s pick for secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, may in fact be a
cipher, a privileged ExxonMobil dealmaker, or a Trojan Horse for
Kissinger’s views. Tillerson is a trustee of the hardline Centre for
Strategic and International Studies think tank, along with Kissinger. So
let’s see how Kissinger’s shadowplay might develop on the new
geopolitical chessboard. Trump starts out already pitted against
America’s vast and powerful intelligence apparatus. The American “deep
state” – the military-industrial complex that survives regardless of
what political party is in power – requires an existential threat to
operate. And that threat, according to the Pentagon, is Russia.

The
ever-shifting “war on terror” is dead. The new normal, as demonstrated
by the Obama administration, is the second cold war. It all hinges on
how – and if – Trump will be able to inflict pain on the US deep state,
and how this might affect its “humanitarian” imperialist leanings.
Kissinger’s strategy implies having closer relations with Russia, whilst
cajoling Moscow to betray its Eurasian ally Iran. Moscow is unlikely to
betray Iran, and pursuing that strategy will only exacerbate Trump’s
conflict with the deep state.

A Trumpian trade-off though is
already on the cards; no more US sanctions on Russia if Moscow and
Washington manage a common mechanism to smash Islamic State, as well as a
new framework on nuclear disarmament. There’s guarded optimism in
Moscow that Trump’s business acumen will eventually lead him to discard
counterproductive containment of Russia, freeing it to profit from the
real deal across Eurasia: economic integration, via the Beijing-backed
One Belt, One Road trade initiative to link economies into a
China-centred trading network, and the Eurasian Economic Union. Sensing
a credible opening, Moscow has invited the Trump administration –
represented by national security adviser Michael Flynn – to join the
Syrian peace talks in Astana, Kazakhstan, alongside Iran, Turkey and the
regime of Bashar al-Assad, due to start on Monday, only three days
after Trump’s inauguration.

Russia and Iran are working as one in
Syria. Russia has actively campaigned to bring Iran into the Shanghai
Cooperation Organisation, the regional security group. Bilateral trade –
from energy to railways, mining and agriculture – is booming. Russia
and Iran are set to ditch the US dollar and use rials and rubles for
trade. This means bypassing the usual US weapon of choice: sanctions.
Thus, betraying Tehran is out of the question for Moscow.

Trump,
for all his rhetoric, cannot renegotiate the Iran nuclear deal signed
by the members of the UN Security Council plus Germany in 2015. Tehran
has met all its obligations. Trump also cannot fulfil his campaign
promise to smash Islamic State, without Iran. Instead of his army of
Iranophobic generals, he would do better to listen to the National
Iranian American Council in Washington, which really understands
Tehran’s stakes in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and the volatile Iran-Saudi
cold war.And Trump “getting tough” on China will hit a BRICS
wall. The next summit between those five leading emerging market
economies (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) is in Xiamen
(廈門), southeast China, next autumn, and the hosts will press for further
integration.

Trump’s generals will also have to inform him that
America cannot afford a war in the South China Sea or the western
Pacific, wars it would have no guarantee of winning. Trump’s advisers –
even the Sinophobes – must have told him that Taiwan and the South
China Sea are Beijing’s top priorities. As Beijing’s foreign ministry
put it: “The one-China principle… is non-negotiable.” Then there’s the
45 per cent tariff that might be slapped on Chinese products, and
possible import quotas. Chinese scholars have concluded it is the United
States that has most to lose in a trade war. After Xi Jinping’s (習近平)
masterclass at Davos, is that all there is? Kissinger, 93, had better
get back to the drawing board.

Trump’s Attempt to Ally with Russia Against China is Equal Parts Racism and Stupidity

Few people today think much about the George W. Bush Administration prior to 9/11. The collective memory of the early Bush presidency is mostly condensed to the Bush v. Gore Supreme Court decision, followed by not much of interest until the 9/11 attacks. But it’s important to recall that the Bush Administration floundered on foreign policy during its initial year, including an ill-advised staring contest with China after a Chinese pilot collided with an intrusive U.S. spy plane and died, leading to the detainment of 24 U.S. air crew until the Bush Administration finally apologized to China for the incident. Until terrorism rearranged American foreign policy, increased tensions with China were the lead storyline of Republican foreign policy.

Donald Trump is still six days away from his inauguration and already he and the GOP are ramping up aggressive rhetoric against China. During the same Wall Street Journal interview in which he suggested he would be open to lifting sanctions on Russia, Trump also stated that he might revisit the “One-China” policy regarding Taiwan. This, of course, comes on the heels of Trump speaking directly with the President of Taiwan, which is unprecedented in U.S. foreign policy.

Meanwhile, Exxon CEO and Trump’s pick for Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said during his confirmation hearing that China should be barred from the islands it has created in the South China Sea. Needless to say, China is reacting angrily, warning Trump that the One-China policy is non-negotiable and that attempts to keep China away from its new South China Sea islands would cause a “devastating confrontation” and would lead to a “military clash.”

All of this is sheer madness. The American relationship with China is complex and problematic for many reasons: China’s human rights record is abysmal and its willingness to steal intellectual property is a significant problem for economies banking on an information economy future. But China is also a crucial trading partner, and the American and Chinese economies depend on one another’s good health.

The Trump team is taking a dogmatic oppositional approach based on very simplistic notions of trade and jobs. The number of jobs being “lost to China” is quite low compared to those being lost to automation, the best way to counter offshoring is to punish companies domestically rather than to threaten China, and the most effective avenue to protect intellectual property from Chinese theft is the very sort of trade deals Trump has consistently opposed. Adopting a hostile military and trade war footing with China threatens to plunge the world into an economic depression or even a brutal military and cyberwar conflict.

Moreover, the Trump team and attempting to create an alliance with the mafia state of Russia to box in China, which is woefully stupid. Russia and China have established a close relationship over the last decade, one that Trump is not going to be able to break apart. Taking sides with Russia against China is a fool’s bargain given that Russia is a declining and unpredictable power, while China is a rising and increasingly well-established one. But Trump sees in Putin a leader in the white supremacist isolationist movement, while China represents the Great Other of the globalized economy.

The choice to pick a fight with China while sidling up to Putin’s Russia is equal parts racism and sophomoric economics, and its consequences are likely to be disastrous. But it’s also a continuation of similarly Republican policy going back at least two decades.

Is Kissinger’s Triangular Diplomacy the Answer to Sino-Russian Rapprochement?

To prevent a Sino-Russia security alliance, the U.S. should remember the advice of Henry Kissinger

As
has been reported extensively in The Diplomat, China and Russia are
increasing their military-to-military ties while simultaneously
conducting a diplomatic offensive against U.S. security policies in East
Asia and elsewhere. Most recently, Diplomat editor Shannon Tiezzi
confirmed that China and Russia will conduct joint land and sea exercises
in and around the South China Sea in September. While these
developments are not indicative of a Sino-Russian security alliance
reminiscent of the Sino-Soviet bloc of the 1950s, they nevertheless
should cause U.S. policymakers to reflect on diplomatic and policy
options for ensuring the preservation of U.S. security interests and a
favorable balance of power in the region.

Geographically,
Russia and China occupy respectively what classical geopoliticians
called the “heartland” and a significant portion of the East Asian
“rimland” of the Eurasian landmass. When Mao’s communists took control
of the Chinese mainland in October 1949, and subsequently entered into a
security alliance with the Soviet Union and its East European empire,
geostrategists warned that such a conglomeration of territory and power
could upset the global equilibrium. In the early 1950s, the great French
writer Raymond Aron in his book The Century of Total War noted
ominously that “Russia has in fact nearly achieved the ‘world island’
which [Halford] Mackinder considered the necessary and almost sufficient
condition for universal empire.” Similarly, James Burnham in
Containment or Liberation? warned that the political consolidation of
the Sino-Soviet bloc would result in the communists “complete world
victory.” The classified U.S. national security document that served as
the doctrinal foundation for the Cold War containment
policy—NSC-68—established Eurasian political pluralism as the
overarching goal of American foreign policy.

The
geopolitical threat posed by the Sino-Soviet bloc gradually receded
when the Sino-Soviet split emerged and was successfully exploited by the
Nixon administration with its famous “opening” to China. The current
Sino-Russian rapprochement should concentrate the minds of U.S.
policymakers on diplomacy designed to prevent a full-fledged
Sino-Russian security alliance. A good start would be to reflect on the
triangular diplomacy pursued by Nixon as explained by his national
security advisor and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.Enjoying this article? Click here to subscribe for full access. Just $5 a month.

“Triangular
diplomacy, to be effective,” Kissinger explained in White House Years,
the first volume of his memoirs, “must rely on the natural incentives
and propensities of the players.” Kissinger explained that the opening
to China and détente with the Soviet Union were pursued as parallel
policies designed to enable the United States to “maintain closer
relations with each side than they did with each other.” It was always
better for the United States, he wrote in Years of Upheaval, “to be
closer to either Moscow or Peking than either was to the other.”
“America’s bargaining position,” he reiterated in his book Diplomacy,
“would be strongest when America was closer to both communist giants
than either was to the other.” In his most recent book World Order, he
again noted that the design of triangular diplomacy was to balance
“China against the Soviet Union from a position in which America was
closer to each Communist giant than they were to each other.”

[T]he management of a balance of power is a permanent undertaking, not
an exertion that has a foreseeable end. To a great extent it is a
psychological phenomenon; if an equality of power is perceived it will
not be tested. Calculations must include potential as well as actual
power, not only the possession of power but the will to bring it to
bear. Management of the balance of power requires perseverance,
subtlety, not a little courage, and above all understanding of its
requirements.

This
does not mean that the United States should accommodate Russian
aggression in Ukraine or China’s aggressive moves in the South China and
East China Seas. As Kissinger recalled in his memoirs, détente with the
Soviets did not prevent Nixon from bombing Haiphong Harbor in North
Vietnam, opposing Soviet designs in the Indo-Pakistan War, and ordering a
nuclear alert to deter Soviet intervention in the 1973 Yom Kippur War.
Nor did the opening to China forestall continued defense cooperation
with Taiwan. Triangular diplomacy as practiced by Nixon and Kissinger
did not mean abandoning U.S. security interests or shrinking from
confrontation when those interests were challenged. Eurasia
is still the world’s dominant landmass, home to most of the world’s
people and resources. The global balance of power still requires that no
major power or alliance of powers controls the key power centers of
Eurasia. For the United States, having better relations with China and
Russia than either has with each other still makes sense in the
post-Cold War world.

The conditions just aren’t right for Kissinger-style triangular diplomacy

The
2014 Russian military intervention in Ukraine resulted in Western
sanctions and strategic pressure that drove Moscow toward greater
cooperation with China. Since then, the mercurial Sino-Russian “marriage
of convenience” has evolved into a genuine strategic partnership based on overlapping interests, and mutual antipathy toward the United States. Although Russia and China are unlikely to declare a formal alliance, it is not in America’s strategic interests to confront a de facto Sino-Russian entente.

Donald
Trump’s election generated hope in some conservative foreign policy
circles that U.S. rapprochement with Russia could create distance
between Moscow and Beijing. Proponents of rapprochement hearken back to
Nixon and Kissinger’s “triangular diplomacy,”
which exploited the Sino-Soviet split to achieve an opening to China,
and positioned Washington for better relations with both Communist
giants than they had with each other. Cato Institute fellow Doug Bandow
espouses this viewpoint in a piece entitled “A Nixon Strategy to Break the Russia-China Axis.”
He argues that improving relations with Russia “would have the salutary
side effect of discouraging creation of a common Russo-Chinese front
against the United States.” America’s leading offensive realist, John Mearsheimer, likewise claims
that if “Washington had a more positive attitude toward Moscow,” this
would engender better relations that would eventually lead Russia to
join “the balancing coalition against China.”

In
the current international context, this approach is problematic for
several reasons. First, the deep ideological fissures that drove the
Soviet Union and China apart during the late 1950s and 1960s are
nonexistent today. Furthermore, Sino-Russian geopolitical competition
has lessened because Russia, unlike its Soviet predecessor, is a
secondary power in Asia. As a result, there is little indication that
Trump, despite his rapport with Vladimir Putin, can drive a wedge
between Russia and China. Certainly there is room to improve U.S.-Russia
relations from their current nadir, which could yield selective
cooperation on mutual challenges such as the Islamic State (ISIS).
However, there is little indication that achieving the modest
improvements in U.S.-Russia relations that are politically and practically feasible would drive Moscow and Beijing apart.

The
situation that Nixon confronted in Asia is not analogous to the one
Trump deals with today. Unlike China and Russia at present, the Soviet
Union and the People’s Republic of China (PRC) were locked in an intense
ideological battle for leadership of the Communist world. As Lorenz M.
Lüthi details in his cogent book, The Sino-Soviet Split: Cold War in the Communist World,
the Soviet and Chinese Communist parties developed intractable
ideological differences in the 1950s over which socialist development
model to pursue. Mao Zedong rejected the Khrushchev era model of
Bureaucratic Stalinism in favor of a Revolutionary Stalinist model with
Chinese characteristics that produced the catastrophic “Great Leap
Forward.” Ideological rivalry contributed to an acute security dilemma,
particularly after China conducted a successful nuclear test
in 1964. The convulsions unleashed by radical Maoism during China’s
Cultural Revolution further exacerbated Sino-Soviet enmity and deeply
unnerved the Kremlin, which through 1970 deployed approximately 39 divisions
along the Sino-Soviet border. The existential threat of war with the
Soviet Union drove Mao to seek rapprochement with America.

Realists
give short shrift to the role ideological factors play in fostering
comity between Russia and China. In contrast to the days of the
Sino-Soviet split, ideology is now a unifying factor in relations. Both
countries harbor intense authoritarian nationalist opposition to Western
and globalist ideologies, but no longer share the common
Marxist-Leninist political orientation that produced the divisive
ideological schisms of the Cold War. Despite their distinctive brands of
authoritarianism (personalist dictatorship
versus one-party Leninist state), Putin and China’s ruling Communist
Party have similar views of the threat posed by Western “universal
values” such as democracy and human rights. They see “foreign
influences,” which they believe have penetrated their societies through
globalization, the internet/social media, and NGOs, as the primary
threat to their domestic grip on power. For China and Russian governing
elites, these influences are a Trojan horse designed to spark
destabilizing “color revolutions” that produce regime change in “non-Western” (i.e. authoritarian) political systems.

Since the 2011 Arab Spring, Moscow and Beijing’s perception
of this threat has only grown, as movements demanding democracy and
reform have swept the globe and reached Russia and China’s doorsteps
through Ukraine’s 2013-2014 Maidan protests and Hong Kong’s 2014
“Umbrella Revolution.” Western observers often discount Russian and Chinese state media’s obsession
with color revolution as authoritarian propaganda. Nonetheless, as long
as Russian and Chinese elites operate under the assumption that the
West is subverting their political systems and domestic legitimacy, they
will be reticent to put much distance between one another.

Russia-China
relations today are geopolitically dissimilar to the relationship in
the 1960s and ’70s. During that time, Moscow and Beijing saw each other
as major security threats. By contrast, Russia and China’s current
strategic objectives are much more impeded by the U.S. and its European
and Asian allies than they are by one another. China’s core strategic
objectives are focused on East Asia, restoring control over Taiwan and
favorably settling maritime territorial disputes in the East and South
China Seas. Beijing’s primary obstacle is American naval power, and the
web of U.S. bilateral alliances (the “hub and spokes” system) with
regional powers such as Japan and Australia. The main obstacle to
Russia’s efforts to secure spheres of interest
on its Eastern European, and South Caucasian peripheries is the
U.S.-led NATO alliance. The European Union Institute for Security
Studies recently published a study of China-Russia relations
containing an interview with a Chinese security expert that epitomizes
this shared threat perception: “China feels pressure in the South China
Sea, and Russia feels pressure from NATO in the Baltic Sea. Russia faces
anti-ballistic missiles systems in Romania and Poland, and China faces
the same in South Korea and Japan. While NATO expands to the East, the
U.S. is strengthening its military presence in Asia.”

Driven
by ideological and geopolitical fear of the West, Russia-China
alignment has engendered close collaboration in mutually beneficial
areas. Cooperation intensified following Western imposition of sanctions
on Russia in 2014. The most high-profile example came in May 2014, when
after nearly a decade of negotiations, Moscow finally cut a deal with Beijing to export Siberian gas to China. This followed the 2013 announcement of a joint venture
between Russian oil conglomerate Rosneft and China National Petroleum
Corporation (CNPC) to develop Eastern Siberian oil and gas fields. In
the short to medium term, it will take time to overcome economic and logistical challenges
to develop stronger energy linkages. However, over the longer term, the
deals should prove mutually beneficial. Russia secures Chinese
investment and locks in comparatively high prices; China diversifies its
energy mix and gains access to new overland energy supplies, which
Beijing considers less vulnerable to geopolitical turmoil and blockade
than energy imported from the Middle East via maritime routes.

The
arms trade provides another example of symbiosis in Russia-China
relations. The trade helps Russia ameliorate its biggest weakness — a
feeble and energy export-dependent economy — while helping China sustain
its ongoing military modernization efforts. Historically, a major
impediment to this trade was Chinese reverse-engineering of
Russian/Soviet armaments, most notoriously Chinese development of the
J-11B fighter, which is
“a direct copy of the Su-27, a one-seat fighter that was developed by
the Soviets through the 1970s and 1980s as a match for the U.S. F-15 and
F-16.” The problem of Chinese reverse-engineering was so severe
that Moscow placed an informal ban on exports of high technology
military equipment to China in 2004. However, Putin’s recent approval of
advanced weaponry sales to China such as the Su-35 fighter and the
S-400 Surface-to-Air Missile system indicates the moratorium has been lifted.
Notably, both parties agreed not to include technology transfer
licenses in these deals, which should reduce the feasibility (and
resultant friction) of Chinese reverse engineering. The trade will
remain mutually beneficial so long as Russia’s economy leans on arms
exports (defense manufacturing employs 2.5-3 million workers,
around 20 percent of Russian manufacturing jobs), and China’s military
industrial complex remain suboptimal at indigenously producing key technologies
such as high performance jet engines and advanced conventional attack
submarines. Russia will also increasingly rely on China as a key
customer, as India, long the biggest buyer of Soviet/Russian arms, diversifies its suppliers and develops its domestic defense industry.
China’s dependence on Russia for advanced military technology is
further reinforced by lack of access to European and American technology
due to a Western arms embargo on China in place since 1989.

Western
observers often highlight the tensions lurking below the surface of
Sino-Russian relations, particularly Chinese economic expansion into
Central Asia, and Russian arms sales to China’s regional rivals,
primarily India and Vietnam. Nonetheless, these sources of friction are
manageable, and, furthermore, the United States has limited ability to
exploit them. For example, it would not be in U.S. interests for
Sino-Russian competition to intensify in Central Asia, as this would
contribute to regional instability and hamstring regional cooperation
against Islamist extremism. If the U.S. and Europe succeed in breaking
Russian dominance of the arms trade with India and Vietnam, this would
actually have the effect of reducing a source of tension between Moscow
and Beijing.

Since
Washington will have difficulty exploiting divisions between China and
Russia, it makes little sense to “freeze out” one party and pursue
rapprochement with the other in the hopes of achieving the sort of
realignment that Nixon pulled off in the early 1970s. This is evidenced
by previous President Barack Obama’s experience with Russia and China.
Although relations with both Moscow and Beijing became strained under
Obama, the U.S.-China relationship, despite a growing rivalry in the
Asia-Pacific region, remained more functional. It could even be said
that Washington and Beijing have developed a peculiar sort of “special
relationship.” This is best exemplified by continuing high-level
engagement through the annual Strategic and Economic Dialogue (S&ED),
an intensive, routinized series of bilateral summits, where American
and Chinese leaders engage on an array of international issues. Despite
many disagreements, Beijing has a working relationship with Washington,
and Moscow does not. As a result, China now occupies the position that
Nixon’s America enjoyed during the 1970s: Beijing enjoys closer
relations with the two other powers in the strategic triangle than they
have with one another.

An
effective strategy for Trump to forestall consolidation of a
Sino-Russian bloc would be to opt for selective engagement with both
Beijing and Moscow. Obviously, engagement would have to be coupled with
continued hedging against intensifying security competition with Russia
in Europe, and China in Asia. Nevertheless, the Trump administration
should also recognize that the shared perception in Beijing and Moscow
that Washington aims to subvert and internally weaken its non-democratic
rivals is detrimental to relations with both Russia and China, and
strengthens Sino-Russian cooperation. Consequently, special efforts
should be made to assure Moscow and Beijing that Washington has no
interest in interfering in their internal politics. This, rather than
tilting toward Moscow, would go a long way toward assuaging the anxiety
that Russian and Chinese elites feel about the United States. If Beijing
and Moscow begin to see the United States as a normal state with its
own interests and goals, rather than a fading hegemon bent on
ideological dominance, it would help make triangular diplomacy possible
once again.

The Trump administration’s antagonistic approach to Iran is undoubtedly influenced by Trump’s pivot toward Israel. Trump, along with his staunchly pro-Israel vice president, Mike Pence, and “passionate Zionist” chief strategist, Steve Bannon, have made clear their commitment to combining Israel’s geopolitical goals with their own. This commitment, however, was tempered by Trump’s recent about-face on new Israeli settlements in occupied territory.

During a phone call between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Trump late last month, Iran was said to have been the major topic as Netanyahu had previously announced that “stopping the Iranian threat” was the state of Israel’s “supreme goal.” The Gulf monarchies also expressed optimism that Trump would take a hard stance against Iran, with some even praising him as the “second coming” of Ronald Reagan in terms of ties between Washington and Tehran.

Further, the pro-Israel lobby has been busy exerting its influence in Congress. In early January, Rep. Alcee Hastings, a Florida Democrat, introduced the Authorization of Use of Force Against Iran Resolution. The bill that would authorize the president to launch a “preemptive” war with Iran without congressional approval and without the precondition that Iran would have committed any action that would otherwise warrant a full-scale invasion.

Specifically, the text of the bill states, “The President is authorized to use the Armed Forces of the United States as the President determines necessary and appropriate in order to achieve the goal of preventing Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons.” Hastings, it should be noted, has received $332,000 from the pro-Israel lobby over the course of his career, including more than $72,000 in the 2016 election cycle. If passed, the bill would offer the Trump administration a carte blanche for starting a war with Iran.

Despite the aggressive posturing of the Trump administration and U.S. allies in the Middle East, experts and analysts are divided as to whether Trump and his advisors will actually follow through. Sharmine Narwani, commentator and analyst focused on Middle East geopolitics, told MintPress News that Trump and his advisors’ aggressive stance toward Iran is likely to conflict with his stated goal of eradicating Daesh (an Arabic acronym for the terrorist group commonly known as ISIS or ISIL in the West).

She explained: “Trump has no national security expertise whatsoever. He currently entrusts that vision with his advisors who probably share his views on a few critical subjects. I don’t see Iran as being one of his personal areas of interest. Let him take the advice of his ‘generals.’ He will hit a brick wall and realize that his vision of a defeated ISIS, al-Qaida, and terrorism can never be a reality by crippling the key ground player that can rout them all.

In the end, Trump is a businessman and he will go where there is more ‘bang for his buck.’ He will not find any particular efficiency in a protracted confrontation with Iran. On the contrary, Iran can be the key to delivering him a domestically-popular ‘ISIS defeat.’ He has to choose one and can’t have both.”

However, anti-war activist and author David Swanson told MintPress that Trump’s support base and decades of anti-Iran propaganda have primed much of the America public to readily accept war with Iran. Even the “average anti-Trump U.S. liberal believes all sorts of false horrors about Iran,” Swanson said, noting that this is in addition to the “40 percent of the country that supports him.” These “longstanding bipartisan lies about nukes and aggression, and heightened anti-Islam bigotry, […] all make the U.S. public more ready to accept any case for a war on Iran.” Swanson further noted that Trump is likely to call for a “limited war” if a military approach is ultimately decided upon. However, in practice, a “limited war” is unlikely to remain within its ideal limits for long.

On a spring morning in 2016, a retired four-star general, who was forced out of his job by then-President Barack Obama, spoke before defence and foreign policy experts gathered just blocks from the White House. The 65-year old speaker, with silver hair and puffy eyes, was blunt. For all the dangers al-Qaeda and the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, known as ISIS) pose in the Middle East, he warned that the Iranian regime "is the single most enduring threat to stability and peace". He recalled that as commander of US troops in the Middle East, the first three questions he would ask his subordinates every morning "had to do with Iran and Iran and Iran".

"We only pray, the rest of us outside this town, that someone good is listening here," he told the Washington crowd, as he issued an ominous prediction: "The future is going to be ghastly", and that "the next president is going to inherit a mess".

Nine months later, James Norman Mattis returned to the US capital as defence secretary of President Donald Trump. As the man who oversees the 1.3 million US troops, manages Pentagon's $582.7bn budget, and directs military policy, Mattis has Trump's ear. The US president fondly calls him "Mad Dog Mattis", although the former general refers to himself as "Chaos", his Marine call sign. Supporters said he is best suited for the defence job because of his combat experience in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as his "strategic mind". Former US defence chief Robert Gates called him a "warrior-scholar".

But critics said Mattis' fixation with Iran, combined with the president's hostility towards the oil-rich Gulf state, could lead the United States into a replay of Iraq - only this time with a much more "disastrous" consequence to the region. Media reports had suggested it's the same eagerness for confrontation with Iran that prompted Obama to fire Mattis as Central Command chief in 2013, at a time when the US and other world powers were trying to engage Tehran and secure a nuclear deal.

Now Obama is out and Mattis is back. Already, the war of words between the US and Iran has intensified in the first three weeks of Trump's presidency, with Mattis calling Iran "the single biggest state sponsor of terrorism in the world", after Tehran confirmed it tested mid-range ballistic missiles. Trump himself weighed in on the controversy, posting on social media that Iran "is playing with fire", as he ordered new sanctions on 13 Iranian individuals and 12 companies. When asked if a military action is possible, he replied, "Nothing is off the table". In response, Tehran fired more test missiles, with one commander of the Revolutionary Guard warning that "if the enemy falls out of line, our missiles will pour down on them". Iran also warned of "dark days to come" in the case of a military attack.

Saeid Golkar, an Iran expert at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, told Al Jazeera: "Unfortunately, the relationship between America and Iran is getting very dangerous. "I think people in the Trump administration will try to make Iran do something stupid," he said, warning of further US actions, such as more sanctions and support for regime change in Tehran. What is also alarming is the bluster coming from the Trump White House, Trita Parsi, founder and president of the National Iranian American Council, told Al Jazeera's Nick Clark.

"If you only have the ability to dial it up, but not dial it down, that is what is most worrisome right now because it could, unfortunately, lead to a military confrontation," he said, as he called on US officials to establish direct contact with Iranian officials to ease the tension. So far, none of the senior Trump officials have made any public effort to talk with Tehran. Like Trump and Mattis, National Security Adviser Michael Flynn - a former military spy chief - is known as an anti-Iran hardliner. Following the recent missile tests, Flynn came out swinging, with the headline-grabbing statement that the White House is "putting Iran on notice".

As Trump's campaign advisor in 2016, Flynn had not been shy in expressing his views on Iran, decrying its "consistent bad behaviour", while calling Obama's nuclear deal as "wishful thinking". Flynn also insisted in his Head to Head interview with Al Jazeera's Mehdi Hasan, that Iran is "intent on having a nuclear weapon", despite proof to the contrary from Iran experts. Trump's chief strategist, Stephen K Bannon, is no different from Flynn. Before joining Trump's campaign, he ran the right-wing website Breitbart, which regularly publishes articles critical of Iran.

As member of Congress, now-CIA chief Mike Pompeo had also advocated bombing Iran's military facilities, calling Iranian officials "serial nuclear cheaters". Amid this backdrop of hostilities, Mohammad Ali Shabani, Iran Pulse editor of Al-Monitor website, said the possibility of a military standoff "seems far-fetched at this point". "One should understand that statements and tweets do not constitute foreign policy," he told Al Jazeera. Shabani said Tehran's "regional strategic depth" and the "complete lack of an international consensus on such a potentially disastrous adventure" should dissuade Trump and his men from going after Iran militarily.

"This is not to mention the domestic US side, where you have a public that is unlikely to stomach another quagmire that would make Iraq and Afghanistan look like a walk in the park," said Shabani.

As for Iran, it is "trying to be a rational actor in foreign policy", and its officials are "very careful not to give excuse" for the US to launch an attack, said Hamid Reza Gholamzadeh, English editor of Tehran-based Mehr News Agency. "The two sides are just testing each other," he told Al Jazeera. "President Trump is trying to bully Iran to take action. Iran is not going to act radically to cause war between the two countries."

But even without military confrontation, Gholamzadeh said Trump's rhetoric and the recent ban on Iranians entering the US have already alienated many Iranians and united them against the new US president. On Friday, hundreds of thousands of Iranians marched nationwide to mark the 38th anniversary of the Islamic Revolution and denounce Trump. Meanwhile, Hillary Mann Leverett, Middle East advisor to Presidents George W Bush and Bill Clinton, told Al Jazeera's News Hour that there is a "misimpression" among many American strategic planners that because of US military dominance, it can impose its will "wherever it chooses to", including in Iran.

"But what they don't understand, and what has happened over and over again, whether it's Iraq, Afghanistan, even Vietnam, is that we are not there. We are not in Iran. "We don't have much at stake as those who actually live there. So, even a weaker party like Iran, compared to the United States, it has so much more at stake in the Middle East that it can really repel what the US may try to do it."

Only three weeks have passed since Trump’s inauguration,
and the U.S. is already closer than ever to a full-scale military
conflict with Iran

In the United States, war is business and business is war. As the U.S. dominates global weapons exports, accounting for 33%
of the entire market, the profits of war for both the private and
public sector have guided U.S. foreign policy and military action for
much of the past century. Though modern history is rife with examples of
the United States using its military to further business interests and
vice versa, nowhere has this been more clear than in Iran. Iran was
among the first nations to be subjected to covert CIA coups when its
democratically-elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh was overthrown for his attempts to nationalize Iranian oil in the 1950s.

In
a story that’s repeated itself in numerous other countries, Iran’s
democracy was replaced with a brutal dictatorial regime that was
pro-United States and pro-United Kingdom. Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi’s
brutality, largely made possible by the CIA and Israeli Mossad-trained SAVAK military police,
targeted the nation’s Muslim population, leading to the rise of
religiopolitical movements. Not surprisingly, it was the growth of this
movement that led to the 1979 Islamic Revolution, which established an
Islamic Republic, and the modern age of antagonistic U.S.-Iran
relations.

Since 1979, the United States has followed a policy
of “containment” regarding Iran. From arming Iraq to enabling the
devastating Iran-Iraq war to attempting to sabotage Iran’s nuclear power
program, the United States has sought to covertly subvert, weaken, and
isolate the nation – frequently through the use of economic sanctions-
as opposed to directly engaging it militarily. Yet, as the latest
election cycle got started in earnest, it became clear that the winner
would be taking a much more direct approach regarding Iran.

While Hillary Clinton was widely considered to be the most hawkish
of the two contenders, Donald Trump shared a similarly aggressive,
albeit more muted, stance. As far back as 2013, Trump made plain his
discontent with the Obama administration’s negotiations with Iran and
the controversial nuclear accord, the fate of which remains uncertain
with Trump as president. Expressing his disdain for the Obama
administration’s handling of the situation, Trump forecast, “We will end up going to war with Iran because we have people who don’t know what the hell they are doing.”

Since
Trump’s inauguration on Jan. 20, his tone has changed rapidly. He’s
become as hawkish as his rival in last year’s election, and the
groundwork for a full-scale military conflict with Iran is being set. A
mere three weeks under the leadership of President Trump, and the United
States is closer than ever to a full-scale war with Iran. The timing,
of course, is no coincidence.

Trump’s stance on Iran quickly
became apparent following his “surprise” victory. Among the first signs
that Trump was to take a decidedly aggressive position regarding Iran
was his nomination of Gen. James “Mad Dog” Mattis as secretary of
Defense. Though Mattis has been praised as a gifted combat commander and
clever military strategist, his animosity for Iran is well-documented. In fact, Mattis’ antagonism with the Middle Eastern power alienated him from former President Barack Obama, who ultimately replaced him as Centcom commander as a result.

Another
indicator of Trump’s aggressive stance on Iran came in the nomination
of Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn as national security advisor. Flynn, like
Trump and Mattis, was fiercely critical of the Iran nuclear accord.
Despite reports from the CIA and Mossad that Iran has no nuclear weapons program nor has it ever been interested in one, Flynn insisted that “Iran has every intention to build a nuclear weapon.”

Yet
it was not until Trump’s inauguration that the possibility of a
full-scale military conflict with Iran moved closer to becoming reality.
Just hours after the inauguration, the White House website announced a “state of the art” missile defense system
aimed at “protecting” the United States against an attack from Iran — a
country that has not threatened to attack the United States.

From there, the situation has continued to devolve. During Thursday’s press briefing, White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer argued
that Iran had previously attacked a U.S. naval vessel — a contention he
used to justify the administration’s bellicose “on notice” remarks.
However, this attack was carried out by Iranian-supported Yemeni Houthi
rebels against a Saudi vessel, a fact Spicer later admitted.

However,
Spicer never addressed his false claim that Iran was responsible for
the attack even though the alliance between Iran and the Houthis is tenuous at best. The Intercept and other media outlets
quickly noted the similarities between Spicer’s statement and incidents
that precipitated past military conflicts such as the Gulf of Tonkin
and Iraq’s alleged possession of “weapons of mass destruction.”

The
eventful week in U.S.-Iran relations would not be complete, of course,
without the announcement of fresh sanctions against Iran. On Friday, new sanctions were officially imposed
on 13 individuals and 12 entities for reasons ranging from contributing
to the ballistic missile program to having alleged ties to
terrorism-related activities. Bloomberg reported
that Trump said the sanctions were directly related to the recent
missile test and that the Islamic Republic is “playing with fire.” While Reuters claimed
that these latest sanctions would avoid violating the 2015 Iran nuclear
deal, it will likely serve to further “provoke” Iran as the deal’s
partial lifting of long-standing sanctions was a major factor in Iran’s
approval of the accord. The re-establishment of sanctions could be
viewed as provocation, as Iran’s defense minister warned in December, with the potential to trigger an armed conflict.

Iran warned the US on Monday that any attempt to encroach on the Islamic Republic's ballistic missile program would constitute the crossing of a "red line." "The US calculations about the Islamic Republic and the Iranian nation are fully incorrect," Iranian Deputy Chief of Staff Brig-Gen Maassoud Jazzayeri was quoted by the Fars News Agency as saying.

"The White House should know that defense capacities and missile power,
specially at the present juncture where plots and threats are galore, is
among the Iranian nation's red lines and a backup for the country's
national security and we don’t allow anyone to violate it," Jazzayeri
said.

Jazzayeri accused US President Barack Obama of making vows
and breaking them by saying removal of sanctions on Iran would be
conditioned on the Islamic Republic halting its ballistic missile
program. Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC)
test-fired two ballistic missiles last month that it said were designed
to be able to hit Israel, defying a threat of new sanctions from the
United States.

The launches followed the test-firing of several
missiles as part of a major military exercise that the IRGC says is
intended to "show Iran's deterrent power and... ability to confront any
threat". The IRGC fired two Qadr missiles from northern Iran
which hit targets in the southeast of the country 1,400 kms (870 miles)
away, Iranian agencies said. The nearest point in Iran is around 1,000
km from Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.

"The reason we designed our
missiles with a range of 2000 km is to be able to hit our enemy the
Zionist regime from a safe distance," Brigadier General Amir Ali
Hajizadeh was quoted as saying by the ISNA agency.

Three months
ago, Washington imposed sanctions against businesses and individuals
linked to Iran's missile program over a test of the medium-range Emad
missile carried out in October 2015. The IRGC, a powerful force
that reports directly to the supreme leader, is deeply suspicious of the
United States and its allies. It maintains dozens of short and
medium-range ballistic missiles, the largest stock in the Middle East.

Washington
fears those missiles could be used to carry a nuclear warhead at some
point in the future, even after Iran implemented a nuclear deal with
world powers in January that imposes strict limits and checks on its
disputed nuclear program. Iran's missile program is subject to UN
Security Council resolution 2231 that calls on the Islamic Republic not
to develop missiles designed to be capable of carrying nuclear
warheads. Iran says its missiles are solely a conventional deterrent.

Henry Kissinger is one of the "bisons" of American politics. One of those who ruined the Soviet Union. It was he who put in a lot of effort to finally tear China away from the USSR and thus, weakening the latter. He is a patriot who put himself on the altar of victory in the "cold war". Even after retiring, he did not give up on the battle throughout his life. He continued to struggle with the remnants of the Soviet Empire. Four years ago, speaking about "the drums of war", which could already be heard, he said:

"The coming war will be so severe that only one superpower can win, and that's us. That is why the EU is in such a hurry to form the superpower, because they know what is coming, and to survive, Europe will have to be one whole cohesive state. This urgency tells me that they know what to expect from us. Oh, how I dreamed of this delightful moment. From the ashes we shall build a new society, there will remain only one superpower, and it will be the global government that wins. Do not forget that the United States has the best weapon, which no other country has, and we will introduce those weapons to the world when the time is right". (Henry Kissinger January 2012).

On January 20th 2012, he arrived in Moscow to give Vladimir Putin an ultimatum and "friendly advice" not to run again for President of Russia. Because otherwise the U.S. will grind Russia into powder: "the third term of Vladimir Putin, this is a war that Russia will lose".

An important guest

It's already been four years. On February 3rd 2016, Russian President Vladimir Putin received the former U.S. Secretary of State in his suburban residence in Novo-Ogaryovo. Like the previous encounter, what they said is not known. It is clear that Kissinger arrived on very important business that cannot be trusted with Victoria Nuland, nor Barack Obama. The visits of Henry Kissinger to Moscow have recently become quite frequent. He came twice in 2013 (spring and autumn), most likely trying to convince Russia to withdraw from Ukraine.

His opinion and the opinion of his circles that he is in (the clan of the Rockefellers) is often ignored by the top political leadership of the US, which has become a cause of many geopolitical defeats of Washington. Henry Kissinger never ceases to remind us that the key to American dominance in the world is the disunity of Eurasia. Washington's biggest defeat was the creation of a political and economic alliance between Beijing and Moscow. The accession of Berlin will completely negate the last victory of American diplomacy and will create a condition of rapid decline of the political weight of the United States. But these powers soon will be able to occupy the White House, and it will be time to talk about the future, the future in which Russia and the United States have to live in.

"New world" by Kissinger

Immediately upon returning to the States, Henry Kissinger wrote a column for the magazine The National Interest, in which he outlined his vision for the future of the world. The most significant points being:

Firstly, the relationship between the U.S. and Russia is currently probably even worse than they were before the end of the cold war. Experts in both countries believe that Moscow and Washington have entered a new phase of confrontation and are unlikely to be able to cooperate effectively on issues of world order. Secondly, he pointed out that Russia and the U.S. should cooperate. According to him, the country needs to develop a concept of partnership, which will set out the roles each country will play in shaping the new world order and the concept of a coordinated approach to it.

Kissinger noted that the U.S. and Russia should cooperate not only among themselves but also with other states. Instability in the world today is unprecedented. Threats arise because of the destruction of state power and the growing number of uncontrolled territories. Such problems cannot be solved by one country, so the United States must continually cooperate with Russia and other world powers. Henry Kissinger did not ignore Ukraine, which, in his opinion should become a bridge between Russia and the West, and not an outpost of one of the parties. Also the diplomat stressed that if the U.S. and Russia were to work together in Syria, along with other major powers, they will be able to create a model for a peaceful settlement of the conflict, not only in the Middle East, but possibly in other areas.

Over the past few years, Washington and Moscow cooperated only sporadically, but great progress was made, which is not surprising: discussions were held outside the agreed strategic format. Therefore, Kissinger stated the need to perceive Russia as an integral element of any new global equilibrium, not only as a threat to the United States.

The forgotten superpower

Let us try to understand the diplomatic lexicon of politics and look at the problem from a great height. How does the U.S (Henry Kissinger) approach problem-solving at the highest, that is, strategic level? This catches the eye. No one in the States (even Kissinger) doubts that the future of the world, at any point, must be addressed with Russia and possibly with even some major countries. Has the rhetoric changed in the last four years? It has long forgotten the concept of a singular global hegemon, which for last 20 years was the USA. Also forgotten are world governments (American), and the strongest army with the most modern weapons.

It should be understood that Russia's "right to decide" was not due to the fact that the United States was flexible, but because the events of recent years and the efforts of the leadership of the Russian Federation has forced Washington to reconsider their opinions and make concessions. An important marker is the desire of the former "masters of the world" to share the burden of responsibility for Ukraine with Moscow, and return it to its dominant period, when this area was once the bridge between Europe and Russia. In fact, the U.S. is ready to retreat and lose half of its influence, until they lose everything.

It's the same thing in Syria. Six months ago it seemed that the days of the Assad regime were numbered, and the entire Middle East would remain not only as eternal pain for Europe and Russia, but also in full orbit of the political power of the United States. Six months later and there has been enormous change. An outpost of the U.S - Saudi Arabia - is on the verge of defeat. Turkey found itself in the situation of Ukraine two years ago, and may simply fall apart. At the same time, Russia and Iran are increasing their presence and influence by leaps and bounds in the Middle East, threatening in the medium term to squeeze the U.S. out of the strategic region.

But because of the mouth of Henry Kissinger, Vladimir Putin has apparently also heard the suggestion to "divide" the region. And this (according to the American political elite) must become a "model" for similar agreements in other parts of Eurasia.

The bridge through Alaska

What did the President of Russia say? I think he said he would think about it for another four years. Through which he will be able to offer Henry Kissinger, or someone else, to make Alaska a "bridge" between Russia and America, and will promise to consider also the interests of Washington and other major powers in Europe. But if they are not satisfied with the American political elite, they will have to wait for the next offer, which is expected in four years. But it seems to me that it will be even worse for them.

There
have been a lot of column inches devoted to the danger of Donald Trump,
if elected, becoming a puppet of Russian President Vladimir Putin. The
Kremlin itself has peddled this vision of the future in its propaganda,
both domestically and in Ukraine. In this scenario, President Trump
lifts U.S. sanctions on Russia and recognizes the annexation of Crimea,
and the U.S. all but drops out of NATO. It’s a frightening prospect: two
world-class bullies becoming best buddies across the ocean. But that is not going to happen—it’ll be worse. Why?
First, Russia is effectively in a state of war with the U.S. Its
military doctrine, adopted in December 2014, identifies NATO as Russia’s
enemy No. 1. Russian propaganda makes clear that by NATO, they mean the
U.S. Turn on Russian TV day or night and you will hear that America is
waging war against Russia. Ukraine and Syria are mere proxies, where
Russians are fighting imagined U.S. aggression. This
anti-American act will not be dropped if a friendly politician comes to
power in the U.S. Putin’s authority rests on an ongoing mobilization of
Russian society, and the vision of America as an all-powerful enemy is
the basis of this mobilization. There is no substitute. Second,
Trump is similar to Putin in a key way: he dreams of the sort of
popularity that can be secured only by conjuring enemies and waging
wars. If elected, he will rattle sabers all the way, and he will quickly
realize that he has the ultimate saber at his disposal: a nuclear one.
Here Putin, who regularly reminds his audiences that he has the nuclear
option, will be his role model—and his opponent. We will quickly come to
the brink of nuclear war. The
Russian military doctrine reserves the right of nuclear strike in case
of aggression—including non-nuclear aggression—against Russia or its
allies. The term allies is not defined by any treaty. In other words,
Russia simply reserves the right of first strike. U.S.
policy toward Putin under President Obama is best described as
strategic nonengagement. First the U.S. tried to empower nominal Russian
President Dmitri Medvedev. Later, with the invasion of Ukraine, the
U.S. imposed sanctions on Russia and has since tried to limit engagement
over Syria. It would be a stretch to call these policies successful,
but they might be the best strategy against an unhinged bully.
Confrontation will certainly be more dangerous for the U.S., Russia and
the world.

Aggressive talk from politicians and military leaders worldwide — amped up by media and the "bellicose chorus" of TV commentary — has former Soviet Union President Mikhail Gorbachev saying: "It all looks as if the world is preparing for war."

"The nuclear threat once again seems real," Gorbachev wrote Thursday in a Time magazine op-ed. "Relations between the great powers have been going from bad to worse for several years now. The advocates for arms build-up and the military-industrial complex are rubbing their hands. "We must break out of this situation. We need to resume political dialogue aiming at joint decisions and joint action." Gorbachev harkened back to the 1980s and his work with the United States to decommission and destroy 80 percent of nuclear weapons amassed during the Cold War.

"In November 1985, at the first summit in Geneva, the leaders of the Soviet Union and the United States declared: Nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought," Gorbachev wrote. "Our two nations will not seek military superiority. This statement was met with a sigh of relief worldwide." President Donald Trump had tweeted some of the tough talk Gorbachev was referring to. "The United States must greatly strengthen and expand its nuclear capability until such time as the world comes to its senses regarding nukes," his December tweet read.

Trump, after his inauguration in mid-January, then said he might offer to end sanctions against Russia in lieu of a nuclear arms reduction. Gorbachev, who has been a critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin at times, continued a call for peace and arms reduction between the U.S. and Russia, Trump and Putin: "The presidents of two nations that hold over 90 percent of the world's nuclear arsenals and therefore bear a special responsibility."

"There is a view that the dialogue should focus on fighting terrorism," Gorbachev wrote. "This is indeed an important, urgent task. But, as a core of a normal relationship and eventually partnership, it is not enough.

"The focus should once again be on preventing war, phasing out the arms race, and reducing weapons arsenals. The goal should be to agree, not just on nuclear weapons levels and ceilings, but also on missile defense and strategic stability. "In modern world, wars must be outlawed, because none of the global problems we are facing can be resolved by war — not poverty, nor the environment, migration, population growth, or shortages of resources."

In its quest for world domination, which the White House has been pursuing for more than a century, it relied on two primary tools: the US dollar and military might. In order to prevent Washington from establishing complete global hegemony, certain countries have recently been revising their positions towards these two elements by developing alternative military alliances and by breaking with their dependence on the US dollar. Until the mid-twentieth century, the gold standard was the dominant monetary system, based on a fixed quantity of gold reserves stocked in national banks, which limited lending. At that time, the United States managed to become the owner of 70% of world’s gold reserves (excluding the USSR), therefore it pushed its weakened competitor, the UK, aside resulting to the creation of the Bretton Woods financial system in 1944. That’s how the US dollar became the predominant currency for international payments. But a quarter century later this system had proven ineffective due to its inability to contain the economic growth of Germany and Japan, along with the reluctance of the US to adjust its economic policies to maintain the dollar-gold balance. At that time, the dollar experienced a dramatic decline but it was saved by the support of rich oil exporters, especially once Saudi Arabia began to exchange its black gold for US weapons and support in talks with Richard Nixon. As a result, President Richard Nixon in 1971 unilaterally ordered the cancellation of the direct convertibility of the United States dollar to gold, and instead he established the Jamaican currency system in which oil has become the foundation of the US dollar system. Therefore, it’s no coincidence that from that moment on the control over oil trade has become the number one priority of Washington’s foreign policy. In the aftermath of the so-called Nixon Shock the number of US military engagements in the Middle East and other oil producing regions saw a sharp increase. Once this system was supported by OPEC members, the global demand for US petrodollars hit an all time high. Petrodollars became the basis for America domination over the global financial system which resulted in countries being forced to buy dollars in order to get oil on the international market. Analysts believe that the share of the United States in today’s world gross domestic product shouldn’t exceed 22%. However, 80% of international payments are made with US dollars. As a result, the value of the US dollar is exceedingly high in comparison with other currencies, that’s why consumers in the United States receive imported goods at extremely low prices. It provides the United States with significant financial profit, while high demand for dollars in the world allows the US government to refinance its debt at very low interest rates. Under these circumstances, those heding against the dollar are considered a direct threat to US economic hegemony and the high living standards of its citizens, and therefore political and business circles in Washington attempt by all means to resist this process.This resistance manifested itself in the overthrow and the brutal murder of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, who decided to switch to Euros for oil payments, before introducing a gold dinar to replace the European currency. However, in recent years, despite Washington’s desire to use whatever means to sustain its position within the international arena, US policies are increasingly faced with opposition. As a result, a growing number of countries are trying to move from the US dollar along with its dependence on the United States, by pursuing a policy of de-dollarization. Three states that are particularly active in this domain are China, Russia and Iran. These countries are trying to achieve de-dollarization at a record pace, along with some European banks and energy companies that are operating within their borders. The Russian government held a meeting on de-dollarization in spring of 2014, where the Ministry of Finance announced the plan to increase the share of ruble-denominated contracts and the consequent abandonment of dollar exchange. Last May at the Shanghai summit, the Russian delegation manged to sign the so-called “deal of the century” which implies that over the next 30 years China will buy $ 400 billion worth of Russia’s natural gas, while paying in rubles and yuans. In addition, in August 2014 a subsidiary company of Gazprom announced its readiness to accept payment for 80,000 tons of oil from Arctic deposits in rubles that were to be shipped to Europe, while the payment for the supply of oil through the “Eastern Siberia – Pacific Ocean” pipeline can be transferred in yuans. Last August while visiting the Crimea, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin announced that “the petrodollar system should become history” while “Russia is discussing the use of national currencies in mutual settlements with a number of countries.” These steps recently taken by Russia are the real reasons behind the West’s sanction policy. In recent months, China has also become an active member of this “anti-dollar” campaign, since it has signed agreements with Canada and Qatar on national currencies exchange, which resulted in Canada becoming the first offshore hub for the yuan in North America. This fact alone can potentially double or even triple the volume of trade between the two countries since the volume of the swap agreement signed between China and Canada is estimated to be a total of 200 billion yuans. China’s agreement with Qatar on direct currency swaps between the two countries are the equivalent of $ 5.7 billion and has cast a heavy blow to the petrodollar becoming the basis for the usage of the yuan in Middle East markets. It is no secret that the oil-producing countries of the Middle Eastern region have little trust in the US dollar due to the export of inflation, so one should expect other OPEC countries to sign agreements with China. As for the Southeast Asia region, the establishment of a clearing center in Kuala Lumpur, which will promote greater use of the yuan locally, has become yet another major step that was made by China in the region. This event occurred in less than a month after the leading financial center of Asia – Singapore – became a center of the yuan exchange in Southeast Asia after establishing direct dialogue regarding the Singapore dollar and the yuan. The Islamic Republic of Iran has recently announced its reluctance to use US dollars in its foreign trade. Additionally, the President of Kazakhstan Nursultan Nazarbayev has recently tasked the National Bank with the de-dollarization of the national economy. All across the world, the calls for the creation of a new international monetary system are getting louder with each passing day. In this context it should be noted that the UK government plans to release debts denominated in yuans while the European Central Bank is discussing the possibility of including the yuan in its official reserves. Those trends are to be seen everywhere, but in the midst of anti-Russian propaganda, Western newsmakers prefer to keep quiet about these facts, in particular, when inflation is skyrocketing in the United States. In recent months, the proportion of US Treasury bonds in the Russian foreign exchange reserves has been shrinking rapidly, being sold at a record pace, while this same tactic has been used by a number of different states. To make matters worse for the US, many countries seek to export their gold reserves from the United States, which are deposited in vaults at the Federal Reserve Bank. After a scandal of 2013, when the US Federal Reserve refused to return German gold reserves to its respective owner, the Netherlands have joined the list of countries that are trying to retrieve their gold from the US. Should it be successful the list of countries seeking the return of gold reserves will double which may result in a major crisis for Washington. The above stated facts indicate that the world does not want to rely on US dollars anymore. In these circumstances, Washington relies on the policy of deepening regional destabilization, which, according to the White House strategy, must lead to a considerable weakening of any potential US rivals. But there’s little to no hope for the United States to survive its own wave of chaos it has unleashed across the world.Source: http://journal-neo.org/2015/02/02/rus-dedollarizatsiya-i-ssha/

The Petrodollar: The weakest link for the US and Saudi Arabia?

Though the Trump administration, and even the U.S. in general, stands to lose much more than it might gain by entering into a military conflict with Iran, another recent development has left little room for choice in the matter. During a television interview on Jan. 29, the governor of Iran’s central bank, Valiollah Seif, announced that Iran would no longer use the U.S. dollar as its currency of choice in its financial and foreign exchange reports. Seif explained the logic behind the decision, saying that “Iran’s difficulties [in dealing] with the dollar were in place from the time of primary sanctions and this trend is continuing.”

He then noted that “we face no limitations” when it comes to the use of other currencies. The change, set to go into effect on March 21, is set to impact all official financial and foreign exchange reports. Forbes noted that the move is likely to “add a degree of currency risk and volatility and is likely to complicate matters for the authorities.” Though it is true that Iran’s currency may suffer in the short term as a result of the measure, the consequences for the U.S. dollar — and thus, U.S. economic hegemony — are far greater.

In the 1970s, after the United States was no longer able to guarantee the value of the dollar with gold, then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger negotiated a deal that would change both the dollar and U.S. foreign policy forever. In order to keep the U.S. dollar valuable, Kissinger convinced the Saudi monarchy to use U.S. dollars exclusively in the country’s oil transactions, thereby generating artificial demand for dollars and, thus, artificial value for a weakening currency. This deal marked the official birth of what is known as the petrodollar system. The other countries that comprise OPEC, which includes Iran, soon followed suit, ensuring the dollar’s dominance for years to come – a crucial piece of U.S. economic hegemony.

However, some countries have since attempted to distance themselves from the dollar and have suffered the consequences. The most notable example is Saddam Hussein’s decision to dump the dollar for the euro in 2000. Following the decision, Hussein managed to generate a handsome profit for Iraq, sending a clear signal to other oil-producing nations that the petrodollar system was not necessarily in their best interest. However, the subsequent invasion of Iraq sent a clear signal that the United States would not passively allow oil-producing countries to exit the petrodollar system.

The next country that attempted to leave the petrodollar system was Libya. Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi, also dissatisfied with the petrodollar system, had established the dinar, a gold-backed currency that was set to become Libya’s currency of choice for oil transactions. Gadhafi had also announced plans to make the dinar a pan-African currency to economically empower other African nations. In 2011, the U.S. destroyed the Libyan state and killed Gadhafi, preventing this deal from coming to fruition.

Russian inroads complicate U.S. efforts to strengthen the government, stamp out the Taliban and end America’s longest war

Russia is making fresh inroads into Afghanistan that could complicate U.S. efforts to strengthen the fragile Kabul government, stamp out the resilient Taliban insurgency and end America’s longest war. Moscow last month disclosed details of contacts with the Taliban, saying that it is sharing information and cooperating with the radical movement on strategy to fight the local affiliate of Islamic State, which has gained a foothold in eastern Nangarhar province, on the border with Pakistan.

Moscow’s ambassador to Afghanistan, Alexander Mantytskiy, and other Russian officials said the cooperation with the Taliban didn’t include supplying it with money or materiel. Taliban spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid described the relationship as “just political.” But the revelation coincides with other Russian moves in Afghanistan that appear aimed, as in the Middle East and Europe, at undermining U.S. influence and seeking regional parity with Washington. The Kremlin held a conference in Moscow last month with China and Pakistan to discuss terrorist threats from Afghanistan and how to combat Islamic State. Since then, Russia has invited the Afghan government to participate in the continuing diplomatic initiative, but not the U.S.

Moscow also has blocked the Afghan government’s efforts to remove Gulbuddin Hekmatyar from a United Nations sanctions list, a crucial condition of an Afghan government peace deal with the warlord’s al Qaeda-linked insurgent group. The deal, strongly supported by the U.S. and its allies, was viewed by the U.S. and other allies of the government as a template for future talks with the Taliban. While the Afghan government of President Ashraf Ghani has publicly criticized any support for the Taliban, one of the biggest boosters of Russian moves in Afghanistan is his predecessor, Hamid Karzai. Mr. Karzai, who served as head of the U.S.-backed government in Kabul for more than 12 years, views Russia as a healthy counterweight to America’s dominant presence in his Central Asian nation of 33 million people.

“The fact is that the U.S. presence in Afghanistan has not brought security to us. It has caused more extremism,” Mr. Karzai said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal. “There has to be a balance of power here now.”

The frequency of the contacts between Russia and the Taliban—and the rank and influence of the officials involved in them—aren’t known. But they are sufficiently worrying to the U.S. that Gen. John Nicholson, the top American military commander in Afghanistan, publicly criticized Russia, Iran and Pakistan last month for their “malign influence” in the country. He singled out Moscow for “overtly” lending legitimacy to the Taliban.

Russia’s claim that it is reaching out to the Taliban because of the failure of the U.S. to curb the rise of Islamic State and other new terrorist groups in Afghanistan is designed to rationalize its policies, Gen. Nicholson said. “Their [Russia’s] narrative goes something like this: that the Taliban are the ones fighting Islamic State, not the Afghan government,” he told reporters last month at the Pentagon briefing.

“This public legitimacy that Russia lends to the Taliban is not based on fact, but it is used as a way to essentially undermine the Afghan government and the NATO effort and bolster the belligerents,” the general said, referring to the 13,000-strong force of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, which is led by about 8,400 U.S. troops.

Foreign government contact with the Taliban isn’t new. Pakistan is widely seen as a major patron of the movement, and in recent years Chinese and Afghan government officials have held separate talks with Taliban envoys to discuss peace prospects in Afghanistan. But in forging open ties with the Taliban, Moscow is befriending the heirs of the insurgency that dealt the Soviet Union its most humiliating military defeat and helped lead to its collapse. In 1989, rebels—many of them Islamic fundamentalists backed by the U.S., Saudi Arabia and Pakistan—drove the Red Army from Afghanistan following a nine-year Soviet occupation. There are few indications of what President Donald Trump’s administration will do in Afghanistan.

In December, Mr. Trump, at the time president-elect, told Mr. Ghani in a telephone call that he would consider sending more American troops, Afghan officials said, in a step to halt the deterioration of the country’s security. Before most foreign troops were withdrawn from Afghanistan at the end of 2014, former President Barack Obama had more than 100,000 U.S. troops in the country. Also, the White House said this week that President Trump would be open to military cooperation with Russia to fight Islamic State. Mr. Karzai said Mr. Trump’s pledge for improved ties with Russian President Vladimir Putin is encouraging.

“I am glad he and Putin are on good terms,” he said. “I hope the two of them will remain friends and work issues out, especially on Afghanistan."

Long live a new era of America's halting involvement in a world not of its own making

As ISIS forces sweep through Sunni Iraq, whether or not the United States will help Baghdad to bring back its provinces has overtaken "bring back our girls" in Nigeria as the central public concern of U.S. foreign policy. The contrast matters because it marks not the end, but potentially the start, of an era of American exceptionalism. The masterful performance through which Michelle Obama galvanized global opinion on the Nigerian schoolgirls might have been seen at the time, only a month ago, as an affirmation of a U.S. belief in its global destiny: That the schoolgirls really were, for the first lady, and for that intangible sense of U.S. mission and responsibility to the rest of the world, "ours."

From the end of World War II, the world’s destiny has been America’s destiny. Although the U.S. market-based economic model has been imitated globally more than its democratic political institutions, the basic structures of international order have been underpinned by America’s economic, military, and cultural influence. From 1945, to subscribe to the idea of the West, or at least to the economic and cultural aspects of that contested concept, has been to subscribe to a U.S.-led international order. That has been the case for better and for worse, as we are respectively reminded, on the one hand, by the U.S. victory in the Cold War, and on the other by the near collapse of the U.S.-centered international financial system in 2008.

The Western world order is no longer a post-1945 platitude, but a distinctly fragile proposition, the reality of which people across the world need actively to be persuaded of to believe in, as President Barack Obama attempted to do in his recent foreign-policy speech at West Point. Superficially, the president appeared to amplify the first lady’s message of America’s global responsibilities: America was the "indispensable nation," so when "schoolgirls are kidnapped in Nigeria… it is America that the world looks to for help."

But the underlying effect of the president’s speech was to bookmark the end of an era of American intervention; it closed the chapter starting from 2001, and perhaps even the volume from 1945.

"Bring back our girls" may have inoculated the United States against claims that it was not upholding the global rights of young women to an education, and implicitly shifted the burden of proving whose world order gave the better deal to young women across to Boko Haram — which threatened to sell the girls into slavery — and Islamic jihadists worldwide. The Twitter campaign isolated a clear-cut case of right and wrong, and was heard across the world, loud and clear.

But sometimes silence speaks louder than words. The world is virtually silent about the genocide going on this very day in the Central African Republic (CAR). There is no global Twitter campaign about schoolgirls there. They aren’t ours. As if to amplify the silent point in the West Point speech that an era of U.S. intervention is effectively over, CAR even dropped out of the rhetorical consciousness of the speech itself from one paragraph to the next:

"Today, according to self-described realists, conflicts in Syria or Ukraine or the Central African Republic are not ours to solve. And not surprisingly, after costly wars and continuing challenges here at home, that view is shared by many Americans. A different view from interventionists from the left and right says that we ignore these conflicts at our own peril; that America’s willingness to apply force around the world is the ultimate safeguard against chaos, and America’s failure to act in the face of Syrian brutality or Russian provocations not only violates our conscience, but invites escalating aggression in the future."

If the responsibility to protect 276 abducted schoolgirls is alive and well, what’s clear from Syria to the CAR is that the "responsibility to protect" whole populations as a doctrine of international policy is dead in the water; it’s the language of the last era, and to suggest otherwise in the face of one of the biggest humanitarian catastrophes in history in Syria is surely untenable.

ISIS in Iraq is in a completely different league of complexity and geopolitical significance than the Nigerian schoolgirls. Given that Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki is most to blame for the chaos, having systematically marginalized the Sunni population since 2010, should Washington back Baghdad at all? Given the risk of making an enemy of all of Iraq’s Sunnis, whose reconciliation with U.S. forces and Baghdad was the prime achievement of the 2008 surge, should the United States strike ISIS? Given that Maliki has shown no competence to be able to retake the Sunni provinces, militarily or politically, if the United States does engage in limited strikes, given the risk of being drawn into an open-ended commitment to back up Baghdad, where does that effort end? Should the United States try to keep Iraq together at all, or is this the moment to cut losses and avoid being drawn into a quagmire of sectarian violence, and see Iraq split up?

And how should Washington understand ISIS: Should it accept Maliki’s self-interested argument that they are the same al Qaeda "terrorists" of 9/11, that this is the same fight against common enemies? Or should the United States refrain from grouping together all jihadists as "the terrorists," thus exploiting the various groups’ principal vulnerability — that they fight endlessly with each other, as ISIS’s break with al Qaeda testifies? If it’s the latter, then ISIS is not part of the war the Obama administration refuses to call the war on terror — despite still relying on the 2001 post-9/11 Congressional Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF). And if the 2001 AUMF is not going to be used to fight ISIS, is the administration going to rely on the 2003 Iraq War AUMF, and thus re-open the war? Or will the White House stand back while ISIS takes control of the Sunni provinces?

It is worth remembering in all this that, barely a month ago, resolving the kidnap of the Nigerian schoolgirls was "one of the highest priorities of the U.S. Government," according to the U.S. State Department.

In the context of far more serious and more morally complicated contemporary security problems today, it still bears looking at the fixation on the Nigerian schoolgirls last month. This was hardly an affirmation of international ambition so much as an example of a relatively small and morally clear-cut case that marked the limits of U.S. interventionism in a new era. The reticence to be drawn beyond those limits is clear from the Obama administration’s agony over whether or not to intervene in Iraq.

The transition from one era to the next marked by the West Point speech could not be better captured than by the now-anachronistic competition among commentators to be the most outraged about why the United States had taken so long to declare Boko Haram a terrorist group, or the delay to put pressure on the Nigerian government to bring back our girls. If there is one lesson from the post-2001 wars, it’s that perhaps we should not rush in to complex conflicts that very quickly move away from being clear-cut cases of right and wrong, to entanglement in intractable age-old tribal fights, with no clear boundary between enemy and civilian.

The anachronism of the commentators’ outrage at the delay in intervention in Nigeria — the knee-jerk desire to intervene everywhere and fight every jihadist under the sun — was nonetheless echoed in parts of the president’s speech. The speech worked where it looked forward, and set out the new and critical distinction between the potentially unilateral use of force "when our core interests demand it," but offered a higher bar for using force in relation to broader issues of "global concern that do not pose a direct threat to the United States." The speech failed where it blurred this new and important distinction by rehearsing the language and motifs of the last era, motifs that now sounded tired, and out of tune with U.S. public opinion.

We heard that "America’s support for democracy and human rights goes beyond idealism — it is a matter of national security," because "democracies are our closest friends and are far less likely to go to war," and that "respect for human rights is an antidote to instability and the grievances that fuel violence and terror." That doesn’t fit with the small print: "In countries like Egypt, we acknowledge that our relationship is anchored in security interests."

We heard that the test of any U.S. drone strike was whether "[we] create more enemies than we take off the battlefield." But the idea of a global battlefield against terrorist enemies is seriously out of date, at least since we worked out that the original Taliban and Saddam Hussein actually had very little to do with al Qaeda. Indeed, the irrational durability of the idea of the world as a battlefield is as anachronistic as Guantanamo Bay.

Paradoxically, the speech itself acknowledged that al Qaeda was decentralized, with many affiliates and extremists having "agendas focused in countries where they operate." But if that is true, why then are they the enemy of the United States? Was the Nairobi Westgate Mall attack, mentioned as an example of a "less defensible target," really an attack against the United States? Five U.S. citizens were wounded, among hundreds of other nationalities. But if that is the threshold for identifying a terrorist group as an enemy of the United States, then Obama’s new distinction is so porous as to be of little practical utility.

The vague and permissive concept of the terrorist enemy that punctuated certain parts of the speech was contradicted by the main direction of the speech, which was about limiting U.S. exposure to open-ended conflicts, not being drawn into other people’s fights and tribal-sectarian wars. Eras of U.S. intervention come and go. Vietnam closed the last one, and Afghanistan will close this one. There will be new eras of U.S. intervention in future, and the closing of the 2001 chapter is not remarkable in the long view, as permanent war is plainly unsustainable. The United States remains the global military superpower, and claims of the end of its military dominance are exaggerated.

If that were the case, why would the speech potentially be closing not just a chapter from 2001 but a volume from 1945?

Consider for a moment President Harry Truman’s inaugural address on Jan. 20, 1949. As cultural historian Nick Cullather has written, by re-framing what would previously have been perceived as colonial intrusion as "development," Truman, as Fortune magazine put it at the time, "hit the jackpot of the world’s political emotions." Cullather notes how leaders of then newly independent states, such as Zahir Shah of Afghanistan and Jawaharlal Nehru of India, accepted these terms, merging their own governmental mandates into the stream of nations moving toward modernity. Development was not only the best, but the only course. As Nehru stated, "There is only one-way traffic in time."

President Obama mentioned the importance of development in the speech, and how American assistance aimed, for example, "to double access to electricity in sub-Saharan Africa so people are connected to the promise of the global economy." A noble thought perhaps, but this is a world away from Truman. The developing states of 1949 are now powerful economies, and they hardly see themselves as little Americas. Westernization in 1949 meant Americanization; now it doesn’t.Westernization in 1949 meant Americanization; now it doesn’t.

The very success of the United States in the Cold War and in the brief period of post-1991 global hegemony was to mold the world in its own image, with the effect that Westernization — at least its economic and cultural dimension — is now so universally accepted in varying forms that it changes the meaning of what being Westernized is: Even ISIS probably uses iPhones. In this new context, despite sympathy with the humanitarian ambition of bringing electricity to sub-Saharan Africa, the very discourse of international development as something Western states engage in seems at best dated: a vexed idea drifting away from its post-colonial moorings towards the post-post-colonial waters in which it has no clear anchor points.

President Obama said that America remains the "indispensable nation." He’s right; it is. But he was wrong to use the examples of "when a typhoon hits the Philippines, or schoolgirls are kidnapped in Nigeria, or masked men occupy a building in Ukraine, it is America that the world looks to for help." That is to attach the meaning of America’s role in this new era to being a first responder for a fragmented set of events that don’t fit into a clear narrative. Moreover, most of the world does not want America as a bull in a china shop, rushing to create new terrorist enemies or to chase Joseph Kony around jungles, changing foreign policy in accordance with the latest YouTube or Twitter sensations.

America does not need to seek sensation, precisely because it remains the world’s great democratic nation.

The rest of the liberal world’s relationship with America is not one of love but one of faith. America is the indispensable nation not just to its allies, but to individuals and families around the world who rely on it to uphold some kind of liberal world order: the educated Afghanis whose families will be killed if the Taliban take control again; the Saudi woman who might hope to drive a car one day; the students in Tehran arrested just for singing "Happy;" or any number of others, from Kiev, through Cairo, to Baghdad.

This faith is not the demonstrative faith of the zealot, but the quiet contemplation that, despite America’s moral failures — be it torture or mass surveillance — recognizes that the United States remains the great liberal power. There are still a huge number of people anxious not to see on their horizon a U.S. carrier group replaced with a Chinese one.

Unlike the sensational reaction desired from rescuing schoolgirls, or capturing Kony, the United States can’t expect any thanks or applause for its routine foreign policy from its faithful across the globe. To be effective, Washington needs to be tough and sometimes make ugly compromises, like backing a corrupt regime in Kabul to stop a worse fate for the Afghan people, or the equivalent in Iraq now. No one is going to cheer that, even if they agree with it.

What is remarkable is not the enduring faith of those around the world in the United States, but the enduring faith of the U.S. public in a U.S.-led international order that is massively expensive and for which they receive little thanks.

The idea of a special global destiny is a fragile idea. Britain used to be the indispensable nation; that ended a long time ago. When Britain announced its famous decision to withdraw "East of Suez" in 1967, Dean Rusk, then U.S. secretary of state, said to a colleague how he could not believe that the British viewed that "free aspirin and false teeth were more important than Britain’s role in the world." That shock would be banal today; the welfare state has permanently replaced the warfare state. The idea of Britain’s global destiny, within a generation, has become ancient history.

But the United States still believes in its unique global destiny: "I believe in American exceptionalism with every fiber of my being," the president said. The truth, however, is that America has not been the exceptional nation since 1945 because of the extent to which the rest of the world has copied it.

America has lost control of what is means to be Western, as a result of its very success in spreading the idea across the globe since 1945. Perhaps the new era that we are entering will see America attempting to re-claim the legacy of the West as its own, for example by working with, not against, the international institutions it set up after World War II. On the other hand, we might see America assume a more genuinely exceptional path, allowing itself to see a different destiny to that of the West, or perhaps more accurately, Western-ism.

The president’s speech undoubtedly marked the end of one era and the first steps into another. Whether and how Baghdad gets its provinces back will be a more accurate signpost of the direction of American exceptionalism in the twenty-first century than the sorry fate of the Nigerian schoolgirls.

Welcome to the multipolar world: Lavrov declares end of US regime change dominoes

The Russian Foreign Minister says Washington's longstanding practice of "ideologically motivated operations to topple undesirable regimes" has failed in Syria. As a seasoned diplomat, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov knows when to keep his mouth shut. This is perhaps the greatest difference between Washington and Moscow: The Russians know that actions speak louder than words. When the Kremlin does make extremely pointed remarks, you can bet they are backed by sober analysis, the "facts on the ground." So it's with great pleasure that we report Lavrov's most recent and incredibly blunt remarks about Washington's failed attempt to turn Syria into the next Libya:

According to Lavrov, the supporters of "messianically imposing their own ultra-liberal values, changing sovereign countries' political systems, among them through ideologically motivated operations to topple undesirable regimes," gained the upper hand in the West some time ago. "The failure of such attempts is obvious, but they will be dealing with the aftermath for a very long time," he emphasized.

The aftermath Lavrov is referring to has several layers to it. The most obvious consequence of Washington's actions in Syria is a massive humanitarian crisis that will take decades to fully rectify. Hundreds of thousands dead. Millions of refugees. A huge swath of the country's critical infrastructure destroyed completely. As Lavrov puts it:

Outside interference turned the region into a space of chaos and anarchy, with numerous radicals immediately taking advantage of this," the minister explained. "Hence, the weakening or collapse of statehood in a number of countries, an unprecedented surge in international terrorism and extremism, and the large-scale migrant crisis that has engulfed Europe.

If you read between the lines, Lavrov is also hinting that there is another serious aftermath to Washington's disastrous and failed intervention in Syria: The west's game of regime change dominoes ends in Syria. It's over. Welcome to the multipolar world. Lavrov said as much when he pointed out that while Russia has always advocated for conflict resolution based on national accord, Washington felt that it could trample on international law and do as it sees fit, wherever it wants, whenever it wants. These days are over. Of course, Lavrov's statements are also a bit of a veiled victory lap for Russia, which, after a little more than a year, managed to completely reverse the massive gains made by the "moderate rebels" and their democracy-loving sponsors in Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the U.S. Imagine where we would be right now if Russia had not stepped up to the plate and stopped this madness. Thank god for our new, multipolar world.

Anders Fogh Rasmussen essentially wants the U.S. to govern the planet:

In this world of interconnections, it has become a cliché to talk about the “global village.“ But right now, the village is burning, and the neighbors are fighting in the light of the flames. Just as we need a policeman to restore order; we need a firefighter to put out the flames of conflict, and a kind of mayor, smart and sensible, to lead the rebuilding. Only America can play all these roles, because of all world powers, America alone has the credibility to shape sustainable solutions to these challenges.

Rasmussen’s op-ed makes many familiar mistakes here. For one thing, the entire “village” isn’t burning, and the vast majority of the world is at peace. The need for both “policeman” and “firefighter” is exaggerated to make it seem as if the world will fall into chaos unless the U.S. acts as the author wants, but that isn’t the case. For another, it can’t possibly be the responsibility of any one government to do all of the things mentioned here. No government has the right or authority to do these things, and there is no single government with either the resources or the competence to police the world. Besides, there simply isn’t enough political support for such a role here in the U.S. Even if the U.S. could competently fill the role Rasmussen describes, it would be a mistake to do it.

The costs of such a role are not only exorbitant, but there is an inherent danger in justifying U.S. actions in these terms. Setting the U.S. up as the enforcer of order around the world effectively puts the U.S. above the rules that all states are supposed to follow, and it gives it an excuse to trample on the sovereignty of other states when the enforcer deems it appropriate. Even if our leaders had consistently good judgment, that would create many opportunities for abuse. Since we know our leaders often make poor choices about how and where to intervene, it opens the door to one disaster after another. We also know our government’s “enforcement” is arbitrary and selective, and when its allies and clients break the rules the U.S. is usually helping them or covering for them. Most of the world doesn’t need and presumably doesn’t want a “policeman” that can do what it likes, shield its clients from punishment, and never has to answer to them, and most Americans don’t want their government to act as one.

Of course, it is misleading from the start to think of a major military power as either a police force or a fire brigade. Both of these are typically services under the control of a local government in one’s own community. The U.S. role Rasmussen describes is necessarily very different from that. It isn’t local or accountable to the people being “policed,” and its “policing” is inevitably an intrusion from outside into their affairs. As for being a “mayor,” mayors are normally elected, but most nations around the world haven’t elected and wouldn’t elect the U.S. as “mayor” of the world. Most of the world doesn’t accept the U.S. as its “policeman,” and in quite a few places that role is vehemently denied.

The global system of peace and prosperity was already on life support before the U.S. president-elect decided to pull the plug.

In 1929, the embittered English writer Robert Graves published a farewell memoir to his country called Good-Bye to All That. A veteran of the Great War, scarred and traumatized at the Battle of the Somme, Graves offered his epitaph to a world brought down by the myopia of a waning ruling class. Unable to see forward, British rulers yearned to restore a bygone age, to make Britain great again, only to destroy the flower of their youth. No sooner did Good-Bye hit the bookstands than governments responded to a financial crisis by throwing up trade barriers, turning currencies into weapons, plunging the world into depression, and then deporting, or later exterminating, foreigners as well as their own citizens.

With the election of Donald Trump to the presidency, the United States seems about to swerve in a similar direction, to go from leading the world as a stabilizer to leading the world as a destabilizer. What’s propelling this about-face is nostalgia for an earlier age of supremacy. In truth, that supremacy has long since passed. America’s continued claim on global leadership is mostly an inheritance from the aftermath of World War II, when American leaders laid the multilateral foundations of what we now call globalization. Diplomats, economists, and philosophers charted a grand bargain for the world, a kind of global new deal. It rested on two pillars.

The first concerned cooperation in the world economy. To prevent a backslide into the protectionist, inward-looking policies that crushed the global economy in the 1930s and led to war in Europe and Asia, global rebuilders hitched national economies to norms, rules, and principles of free trade. The result was a boom. From 1950 to 1973, world per capita incomes grew by 3 percent per year — powered by a trade explosion of 8 percent per year. Cooperation triumphed; interdependence brought prosperity.

The second pillar concerned national policies. To cope with the dislocations of free trade and interdependence, governments created safety nets and programs at home to manage the risks and to shelter the castaways. From welfare to workplace protections, from capital controls to expanded education, national policies buffered market perils and helped families adapt to commercial and technological changes. What’s more, many of these programs extended to the dislocated who left home altogether, like those who departed Puerto Rico for the United States, Italy for Canada, Algeria for France, Cambodia for Australia. Education, workplace protections, and pathways to citizenship were part of a bundle of rights conferred on immigrants.

This was the global new deal that buoyed the postwar liberal order: a coherent, complementary set of policies that opened borders while protecting societies from the hazards of integration across those borders.

It was unsustainable. Both pillars eventually collapsed like Greek columns. Over seven decades, their foundations shifted beneath them. We are now witnessing, in Trumpism, its death throes. And there is no way to re-create the conditions that led to the original global new deal, and the years of relative stability and tolerance that came with it; we may never see its like again.

At the dawn of the Washington-led rebuild in 1945, the U.S. economy was larger than all of Europe, Japan, and the USSR combined — the result of a global war that leveled the productive capacity of almost every other major power. The effects of the war yielded a global Leviathan unlike any we’d seen before — but one that did not impose itself, like Rome, on its neighbors. It did not have to. Indeed, what was remarkable about the long reconstruction process was how much elites and workers across Europe and Asia agreed on the fundaments of postwar integration. For them, after all, the global new deal offered them resources — Marshall Plan aid, U.S. foreign direct investment — and markets upon which to reassemble flattened economies and societies. For the United States, markets for manufactured goods and investment, shut down by the inward turn of the Great Depression, got thrown back open. According to recent estimates by one team of economic historians, the postwar export surge generated between 1.3 million and 1.97 million American jobs.

This new deal didn’t depend on a hegemon to force others to get on board. It did, however, depend on one to coordinate the elaborate set of systems involved in managing currencies, to facilitate the negotiations involved in dismantling trade barriers and agreeing on standards — in other words, it required a leader to ensure all the pieces were in place for the new system to function as a whole. That liberal Leviathan, it was always clear, would be the United States. It is easy to lead when you are that dominant.That liberal Leviathan, it was always clear, would be the United States. It is easy to lead when you are that dominant.

In short order, however, the success of this model began to eat away at that dominance — and thus, U.S. ability to coordinate and lead. Postwar global integration was so successful that soon Japan, Germany, and eventually China, South Korea, and Brazil were scrambling for market share. By the 1960s, Ford had to compete on its home turf with Toyota. Global trade would continue to boom in the decades to come; from 1980 to 2011, world trade grew by an astonishing 8.2 percent per year — twice as fast as world output. China leaped from a meager 0.89 percent of world export shares in 1980 to 10 percent in 2011, muscling past the United States. As a share of world exports, the United States slipped from approximately 12 percent to 8 percent over the past quarter century. In that period, the United States held its own as the world’s safety net for imports — consuming 12.3 percent of the world’s imports (China trails with 9.5 percent) and creating a trade imbalance of unprecedented proportions. China currently commands the same share of world exports that the United States enjoyed in 1968 — almost 14 percent.

The slipping dominance of the United States nearly caused this system to fall apart much earlier. In the 1970s and 1980s, the first great malaise set in in the West, and the signs of a spreading precariat were everywhere. Factories closed; New York went bankrupt; in the winter of 1978-79, the lights went out in Britain and people shivered in the dark; Ford’s global market share began to nosedive. The global Club of Rome think tank in 1972 predicted the end of growth and the beginnings of a dark age of scarcity. Even Hollywood got into the gloom business, with Sally Field playing Norma Rae in a dying mill town in North Carolina and Jennifer Beals playing a hard-luck steelworker whose way out of the Rust Belt was exotic dancing.

Then, the global system got two, improbable lifelines.

One came in the form of credit. Moneylending took off as banks got deregulated. After 1973, the global financial industry soared; within a decade, financial markets had grown 400 percent. The value of daily trading on the New York Stock Exchange grew from $10 million in 1970 to over $1 billion by 2005. Now, it was not just commodities that sutured the world into one market, but capital. An alarming amount of financial interdependence, however, took the form of debt — both household and governmental. Total credit market debt (public and private) in the United States doubled from 1970 to 1998. Then it soared and never looked back. According to McKinsey, the global stock of debt to gross domestic product rose even more after the crisis of 2008. Last year, it ballooned to $152 trillion — over 225 percent of world output. Half the debt load rests on government shoulders. Private and public debt kept spending afloat even though tax bases and personal incomes for the bottom half sagged.

The second was cheap fossil fuels. The discovery of new crude oil reserves and rising use of natural gas licked the second oil crisis of the late 1970s, and, except for a brief spike during the presidency of George W. Bush, energy prices continued their long-term decline. Despite warnings that we would bake the planet, ever more coal, gas, and oil was combusted to move the world’s vehicles, spread its factories, and cool its homes — except liberalized trade, and Asia’s growing middle classes, meant the world included more of each. Liberalizing world trade and industrializing Asia released 4 billion metric tons of carbon into the atmosphere in 1970; the figure is now 10 billion. Fully half the fossil fuel-induced CO2 emissions worldwide since 1750 have taken place since 1985.

I said these were improbable lifelines because those of us who watched the figures in the 1970s and 1980s tended to see the “energy crisis” and the “debt crisis” as chokeholds on global prosperity. It turns out that they were the opposite.

At the same time, rising global competition ravaged national welfare states. Governments facing cheap imports still abided by treaties that barred them from turning to protectionist measures; instead, with the victories of Margaret Thatcher in Britain and Ronald Reagan in the United States, a drive to free up markets, dismantle labor protections, and slash taxes aimed to help industries best their rivals by slashing their costs. Despite economic growth, America’s working class braced for a 35-year stagnation in real hourly wages.

What had once been a comprehensive, integrated system of policies that allowed free trade and social safety nets to work in tandem became, in the absence of strong global leadership, a race to the bottom, sustained by carbon and credit. Domestic safety nets got torn up in a fever to make economies more nimble. Deregulators, privatizers, and a free market orthodoxy took hold, shredding the pacts that once eased the effects of globalization. Trade unions, once key to manufacturing the consent behind the global new deal, got crushed. As supply chains outsourced automobile parts production to Indonesia and T-shirt-making to Bangladesh, dependence across societies produced greater inequality within them. And yet the system bumped along: Public services and protections softened market risks before 1973; in the decades afterward they were replaced by the private comforts of combustion and monthly credit card bills.

If access to carbon and credit appeared to solve the problem for a time, there was an additional, sustaining shock. In 1989, American leadership got a new lease on life — at least for a while. The fall of the Berlin Wall, the breakup of the USSR, and some gloating about the end of history created some sense of renewed American grandeur and the triumph of free markets. This euphoria, however, masked underlying structural shifts that eroded U.S. dominance still further; while the Soviet bloc collapsed, behind the scenes, there was a dramatic retooling of the Asian economies. Germany also upgraded its automobile, aircraft, and pharmaceutical prowess.

The reckoning could not be put off forever. The dual addictions to carbon and credit are now under assault. The bill for relying on fossil fuels is turning up in the form of climate change, while swaths of the unprotected precariat work part-time jobs in Walmart and Home Depot to cover the monthly interest on their Visa cards.

And now: Not since 1930 has the global trading order been more threatened. No one is coming to the rescue.Not since 1930 has the global trading order been more threatened. No one is coming to the rescue. David Cameron botched the Brexit campaign. Hillary Clinton stumbled through questions about the misunderstood Trans-Pacific Partnership and cringed whenever NAFTA came up. In the vacuum, wall-builders promise to revive a zombie version of American grandeur with more carbon, more credit, and a mercantilist crusade.

Global integration relied on the United States playing a vital stabilizing role in an otherwise turbulent world. After a long life, the seven decade-long American-led order is now exhausted. It was running out of steam anyway. But what comes next is not a simple process of slow sputtering out. In order to make America great again, a coalition of wall-builders and treaty-shredders will aim to upend the grand strategy that informed generations of thinking and policymaking since 1945. What the new regime in Washington promises to do now is to become the single-most important source of global instability.

Meanwhile, the emergent world order will be one deprived of a dominant actor. The world has yet to master the idea of leadership without dominance. And the unique moment in global history that produced the liberal Leviathan and allowed it to cobble together wholesale a system that gave the world relative peace and prosperity for decades is giving way to a more uncertain, fragile successor. The long cycle of integration and relative tolerance forged by U.S. leadership since World War II is now headed in reverse.

﻿Decades of unchallenged pre-eminence have left Americans fearful of change but also greatly in need of it.

Very curious to watch Donald Trump’s inauguration last week. These rituals are always heavy on signifiers and light on substance, as they are supposed to be, but Trump’s confirmation as our 45th president was an extreme case. I was especially interested to see whether the media’s cartoon rendering of reality during the campaign season would carry over once he moved into the White House. It will, as is already clear. We are treated to a preposterous rendering of Barack Obama’s virtues, and we are in for yet more exorbitant accounts of Trump’s shortcomings. Press reports this time around may be to journalism what graphic novels are to literature—filled with stick figures and stock imagery, wanting in all complexity.

Let’s be clear: There is plenty to brace for and defend as Donald Trump assumes the presidency. All those who marched in cities and towns across the planet last weekend did so with justification. But simplifications of the kind that our orthodox-liberal media foist upon us will not do. The obsessions with taste and style they encourage amount to schoolyard crudities when put against all that Americans ought to be concerned with. Contempt as a unifying principle, a thought that people who ought to know better now suggest, is unbecoming all around and holds no promise. The world and our moment, a moment of historical significance, whiz by. If you want to talk about resistance, the first thing to resist is blindness to events vastly more consequential than crowd counts and braggadocio.

“With the election of Donald Trump, the old world of the 20th century is finally over,” Frank-Walter Steinmeier wrote in Bild am Sonntag, the German tabloid, last Sunday. This is a very large assertion, not to be ignored. The German foreign minister, a Social Democrat in Chancellor Angela Merkel’s across-the-aisle coalition, is a curious figure. Since taking office in late 2013, he has consistently, if occasionally, voiced objections to American hegemony in global affairs. Read the sentence again: Steinmeier makes his observation with subtly plain relief.Should we Americans share Steinmeier’s apparent sense of anticipation for the end of something and the beginning of something else? This is our question.

President Trump has faced unceasing resistance from the Pentagon, NATO, and the national security apparatus ever since he proposed a renewed détente with Russia. He has made clear his disapproval of Washington’s “regime change” policies on many occasions. Trump has been preoccupied with the sacrifice of American jobs to corporate-written, corporate-indulgent trade accords for more than two decades, according to people who have followed him over the years. He may or may not succeed in doing much to remedy this abuse of the American working class, but that is a separate conversation. On Monday he formally killed the Trans-Pacific Partnership, Obama’s breathtakingly anti-democratic framework for radical deregulation. (Let us dispense with the fiction that the TPP was a trade deal; it was nothing of the kind).

Another way to pose the same question as above: What do we think of Trump’s positions on these issues? It is past time we all ask ourselves.

I wrote of the disgrace of our reigning Russophobia in a previous column. Nobody in Washington seems to have much to say just yet about “regime change,” but they will in due course. You are not encouraged to applaud the demise of the TPP for the devastating impact it would have had on employment, product safety, drug prices, the environment, Internet freedom, the democratic process, and much else. It reflected “a more complex corporate calculus,” as The New York Times preciously put it in Tuesday’s edition. One is absolutely certain it did.

These are all fronts in a conflict. It is between those defending the “liberal order,” as it is called, and those who propose either to alter it in significant aspects or to replace it. There is no precedent for this in my lifetime. One question at a time, it will be our responsibility to stand on one side or the other. No, Mama didn’t say there’d be days like this.

Liberalism has grown illiberal, and its order lies before us as a perilous disorder.

“How the world will look tomorrow is not settled,” Steinmeier wrote in his opinion-page piece. It is perfectly true, of course. And an excellent prospect, in my view. Any promise of change that purports to guarantee certainty cannot come to much. Sixty-odd years of more or less unchallenged pre-eminence have left most Americans fearful of change but also greatly in need of it. It has left our leadership incapable of it. Liberalism has grown illiberal—we know this now—and its order lies before us as a perilous disorder.

* * *

A defining feature of the new era is the dramatic emergence of numerous non-Western poles of power.

The customary phrase is “the post-1945 order,” referring to the American-dominated Western alliance and the institutions—the United Nations, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade—set up to provide a multilateral frame for it. Scores of nations came into being, for this was the “independence era” too. When President Truman and Dean Acheson, his secretary of state, declared the Cold War official in 1947, the world divided into two: There was liberal democracy, and there was the Communist bloc. Note, however: this account must be bracketed with “supposedly.”

The post-1945 order was never so orderly, in truth. Many nations elected to remain neutral in the East-West conflict, making a third category. The four “Ns,” as I call them—Nehru, Nasser, Nkrumah, Nyerere—all led nonaligned nations, or did until Washington alienated them. So did Mossadegh, Sukarno, Arbenz, Lumumba, Ho, and many others. Since nonalignment was unacceptable to the United States, to say nothing of the socialist bloc as an alternative, coups—more than 30 US-cultivated, by accepted counts—became a common feature of the post-1945 order. The multilaterals turned out to be instruments for the imposition, usually by coercion, of neoliberal economic structures. As to the UN, I count the corruption of the ideal it represented one of the century’s great tragedies.

The post-1945 order is what is now at issue. But we are again stuck with “supposedly,” for the post-1945 order, such as it was, gave way to the post­–Cold War order after the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991. American triumphalism triumphed in the early 1990s, our “end of history” moment. Washington renamed coups as “regime changes” and observed no constraints whatsoever in conducting them. No pretense of abiding by international law remained, as the 2003 invasion of Iraq made plain. Deregulation, privatization, the wholesale dismantling of public-sector enterprises, the elimination of basic subsidies: The multilaterals made these and other such conditions mandatory in their country programs. “Savage capitalism,” the Argentines took to calling it in the 1990s. At Treasury and State, sanctions against uncooperative nations became à la mode.

Unfortunately for Francis Fukuyama et al., American triumphalism coincided with the dramatic emergence of numerous non-Western poles of power, notably China, Russia, India, and Iran. The history that had (again, supposedly) just ended turned out to be turning its wheel, as anyone with an understanding of how the world works could have foreseen. As a defining feature of the 21st century, this was inevitable, in my view. Not to be missed is the extent to which Washington’s persistent hubris and intolerance has come to turn natural affinities into economic and, vaguely for the time being, even strategic alliances: Russia-China, Russia-Iran, China­-Iran, and so on. China’s Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership is frontally intended as a reply to the TPP, just as the Beijing-sponsored Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank is a response to the conditionality embedded in the multilaterals’ country programs. Those who think the Obama presidency did anything other than worsen the global disorder just described may benefit from some blunt language. Barack Obama backed neo-Nazis in Ukraine to precipitate a coup intended to be to America’s advantage. In Syria he supported radical Islamists to induce yet another “regime change”—a precise repeat of Zbigniew Brzezinski’s foolhardy gambit in Afghanistan. Obama allowed his secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, to oversee the dispatch of Libya into chaos. His drone attacks, determined on the basis of an assassination list reviewed weekly, require no comment as to their legality or, indeed, decency. In my estimation, his most consequential legacies on the foreign side will be the wholly unnecessary animus toward Russia and China he has induced. This list is partial, but I add one more entry: Obama passed up a hundred opportunities to bring order to the 21st century by forging new relationships through which the United States could begin leaving the “post-1945 order” and its later offspring behind.

The head of US Special Operations Command just gave a frank assessment of the state of the American government, and it wasn't pretty. Speaking at a military conference in Maryland, Gen. Raymond Thomas told attendees: "Our government continues to be in unbelievable turmoil. I hope they sort it out soon because we're a nation at war."

Thomas didn't mention any specific issues with the government. But his remarks came less than a month into the Trump administration and less than a day after Michael Flynn abruptly resigned as national security adviser over the fallout of his having discussed sanctions with the Russian ambassador to the US before Trump took office. A New York Times report published Tuesday evening also said Trump campaign officials spoke with Russian intelligence officials often before the election, and a Times investigation into Trump's National Security Council revealed a chaotic decision-making process. From The Times:

"Three weeks into the Trump administration, council staff members get up in the morning, read President Trump's Twitter posts and struggle to make policy to fit them. Most are kept in the dark about what Mr. Trump tells foreign leaders in his phone calls. Some staff members have turned to encrypted communications to talk with their colleagues, after hearing that Mr. Trump's top advisers are considering an 'insider threat' program that could result in monitoring cellphones and emails for leaks."

When asked later about his comments, Thomas told The Times: "As a commander, I'm concerned our government be as stable as possible." It's rather uncharacteristic for a top active-duty military officer to offer such public critiques, but it's not the first time. A military judge said earlier this week that Trump's campaign rhetoric about Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl on the campaign trail was "disturbing." Still, Thomas concluded that the Special Operations forces under his command — including Navy SEALs, Army Special Forces, and Marine Raiders — were "staying focused" despite the dysfunction in Washington.

Coming Social Instability in America Predicted Years Ago, Researchers Say

A
period of social instability is coming to the United States, and it was
predicted years ago according to a professor of ecology and
evolutionary biology who specializes in Cliodynamics at the University
of Connecticut. To those who see the election of Donald Trump to the
presidency of the United States as a sign of the apocalypse, the idea
that America might be headed for a bit of social instability probably
does not seem that insightful. However, if you warned people it was
coming 10 years ago and even laid out the evidence explaining why, then
you might deserve a little credit of the “I told you so” variety.

That is kind of what Professor Peter Turchin says in a recent article
posted to Phys.org. But the article isn’t a hindsight account of
current affairs based on what has come to pass in recent months.
Instead, it is a review of the work Turchin has published in recent
years that predicted many of the types of social change we are currently
experiencing. For instance, Turchin opened a brief 2010 article
published in the journal Nature with the line, “The next decade is
likely to be a period of growing instability in the United States and
western Europe.”

Granted, that is a rather vague prediction, but
England’s “Brexit” vote and the election of Donald Trump and the rise
of the alt-right/neo-Nazi movement in the United States have
unquestionably caused a higher-than-usual degree of social instability
and unrest. And while the conflict in the Ukraine could be described as
an Eastern European affair, it and the subsequent NATO realignment in
the region have definitely caused some social anxiety in Western Europe.
That’s not to mention the political challenges caused by tensions over
immigration and the ongoing threat of terrorism (not to link the two
causally) in the United States and Western Europe. Turchin did offer
some specific indicators that lead him to believe we were headed for a
period of social instability in his Nature article.

“In the
United States, we have stagnating or declining real wages, a growing gap
between rich and poor, overproduction of young graduates with advanced
degrees, and exploding public debt,” Turchin wrote.

“These seemingly
disparate social indicators are actually related to each other
dynamically. They all experienced turning points during the 1970s.
Historically, such developments have served as leading indicators of
looming political instability.”

If we didn’t know better, we’d
say the parts about declining real wages, the gap between rich and poor
and the growing number of college graduates (with the implication that
they cannot find adequate jobs) all sound like they were torn straight
from Bernie Sanders’ primary campaign stump speeches, except Turchin
published them years prior. Turchin employees the study of Cliodynamics,
which he describes as “a new ‘transdisciplinary discipline’ that treats
history as just another science,” to predict social shifts in the
United States. He began applying this approach to his research on social
and political trends in the United States ten years ago. What I
discovered alarmed me,” he admits in the Phys.org article.

Turchin
predicted that social instability would reach a peak in the 2020s in
the United States, and he now says that the election of Donald Trump
does nothing to change this trajectory and may even exacerbate it. What
concerns him most is the threat of what is known as “elite
overproduction.”

“[T]here is another important development that
has been missed by most commentators: the key role of ‘elite
overproduction’ in driving waves of political violence, both in
historical societies and in our own,” Turchin says, referring to a
previous article he wrote for Bloomberg titled “Blame Rich, Overeducated Elites as Our Society Frays.”

Turchin
notes that between 1983 and 2010, the number of American households
worth $10 million or more grew from 66,000 to 350,000. Because wealthy
people tend to be more politically connected, this growing number of
wealthy elites creates intensified competition among them for political
and social dominance.“Elite overproduction generally leads to
more intra-elite competition that gradually undermines the spirit of
cooperation, which is followed by ideological polarization and
fragmentation of the political class,” Turchin says.

“This happens
because the more contenders there are, the more of them end up on the
losing side. A large class of disgruntled elite-wannabes, often
well-educated and highly capable, has been denied access to elite
positions.”

In other words, it won’t just be the economically
underprivileged, the working class and the middle class who will
increasingly feel frustrated in the coming years. There will also be a
growing number of the 1 and 2 percent competing with each other and
pulling the social and political levers that they have greater access
to. This, in turn, could lead to increased levels of social unrest.
Here’s to hoping Turchin is wrong, but it definitely feels like we are
entering a phase of social instability.

You know George Soros. He’s the investor’s investor—the man who still holds the record for making more money in a single day’s trading than anyone. He pocketed $1 billion betting against the British pound on “Black Wednesday” in 1992, when sterling lost 20 percent of its value in less than 24 hours and crashed out of the European exchange-rate mechanism. No wonder Brits call him, with a mix of awe and annoyance, “the man who broke the Bank of England.”

Soros doesn’t make small bets on anything. Beyond the markets, he has plowed billions of dollars of his own money into promoting political freedom in Eastern Europe and other causes. He bet against the Bush White House, becoming a hate magnet for the right that persists to this day. So, as Soros and the world’s movers once again converge on Davos, Switzerland, for the World Economic Forum this week, what is one of the world’s highest-stakes economic gamblers betting on now?

He’s not. For the first time in his 60-year career, Soros, now 81, admits he is not sure what to do. “It’s very hard to know how you can be right, given the damage that was done during the boom years,” Soros says. He won’t discuss his portfolio, lest anyone think he’s talking things down to make a buck. But people who know him well say he advocates making long-term stock picks with solid companies, avoiding gold—“the ultimate bubble”—and, mainly, holding cash.

He’s not even doing the one thing that you would expect from a man who knows a crippled currency when he sees one: shorting the euro, and perhaps even the U.S. dollar, to hell. Quite the reverse. He backs the beleaguered euro, publicly urging European leaders to do whatever it takes to ensure its survival. “The euro must survive because the alternative—a breakup—would cause a meltdown that Europe, the world, can’t afford.” He has bought about $2 billion in European bonds, mainly Italian, from MF Global Holdings Ltd., the securities firm run by former Goldman Sachs head Jon Corzine that filed for bankruptcy protection last October.

Has the great short seller gone soft? Well, yes. Sitting in his 33rd-floor corner office high above Seventh Avenue in New York, preparing for his trip to Davos, he is more concerned with surviving than staying rich. “At times like these, survival is the most important thing,” he says, peering through his owlish glasses and brushing wisps of gray hair off his forehead. He doesn’t just mean it’s time to protect your assets. He means it’s time to stave off disaster. As he sees it, the world faces one of the most dangerous periods of modern history—a period of “evil.” Europe is confronting a descent into chaos and conflict. In America he predicts riots on the streets that will lead to a brutal clampdown that will dramatically curtail civil liberties. The global economic system could even collapse altogether.

“I am not here to cheer you up. The situation is about as serious and difficult as I’ve experienced in my career,” Soros tells Newsweek. “We are facing an extremely difficult time, comparable in many ways to the 1930s, the Great Depression. We are facing now a general retrenchment in the developed world, which threatens to put us in a decade of more stagnation, or worse. The best-case scenario is a deflationary environment. The worst-case scenario is a collapse of the financial system.”

Soros’s warning is based as much on his own extraordinary personal history as on his gut instinct for market booms and busts. “I did survive a personally much more threatening situation, so it is emotional, as well as rational,” he acknowledges. Soros was just 13 when Nazi soldiers invaded and occupied his native Hungary in March 1944. In only eight weeks, almost half a million Hungarian Jews were deported, many to Auschwitz. He saw bodies of Jews, and the Christians who helped them, swinging from lampposts, their skulls crushed. He survived, thanks to his father, Tivadar, who managed to secure false identities for his family. Later, he watched as Russian forces ousted the Nazis and a new totalitarian ideology, communism, replaced fascism. As life got tougher during the postwar Soviet occupation, Soros managed to emigrate, first to London, then to New York.

Soros draws on his past to argue that the global economic crisis is as significant, and unpredictable, as the end of communism. “The collapse of the Soviet system was a pretty extraordinary event, and we are currently experiencing something similar in the developed world, without fully realizing what’s happening.” To Soros, the spectacular debunking of the credo of efficient markets—the notion that markets are rational and can regulate themselves to avert disaster—“is comparable to the collapse of Marxism as a political system. The prevailing interpretation has turned out to be very misleading. It assumes perfect knowledge, which is very far removed from reality. We need to move from the Age of Reason to the Age of Fallibility in order to have a proper understanding of the problems.”

Understanding, he says, is key. “Unrestrained competition can drive people into actions that they would otherwise regret. The tragedy of our current situation is the unintended consequence of imperfect understanding. A lot of the evil in the world is actually not intentional. A lot of people in the financial system did a lot of damage without intending to.” Still, Soros believes the West is struggling to cope with the consequences of evil in the financial world just as former Eastern bloc countries struggled with it politically. Is he really saying that the financial whizzes behind our economic meltdown were not just wrong, but evil? “That’s correct.” Take that, Lloyd Blankfein, the Goldman Sachs boss who told The Sunday Times of London at the height of the financial crisis that bankers “do God’s work.”

To many, the idea of Soros lecturing the world on “evil” is, well, rich. Here, after all, is an investor who proved—and profited hugely from—the now much-derided notion that the market, or in his case a single investor, is more powerful than sovereign governments. He broke the Bank of England, destroyed the Conservative Party’s reputation for economic competence, and reduced the value of the pound in British consumers’ pockets by one fifth in a single day. Soros the currency speculator has been condemned as “unnecessary, unproductive, immoral.” Mahathir Mohamad, former prime minister of Malaysia, once called him “criminal” and “a moron.”

In the U.S., where the right still has not forgiven him for agitating against President George W. Bush and the “war on terror” after 9/11, which he described as “pernicious,” his prediction of riots on the streets—“it’s already started,” he says—will likely spark fresh criticism that Soros is a “far-left, radical bomb thrower,” as Bill O’Reilly once put it. Critics already allege he is stoking the fires by funding the Occupy movement through Adbusters, the Canadian provocateurs who sparked the movement. Not so, says Soros.

Soros’s fragrant personal life will also prompt many to pooh-pooh his moralizing. Last year, Adriana Ferreyr, his 28-year-old companion for many years, sued him in New York Supreme Court in Manhattan, alleging he reneged on two separate promises to buy her an apartment, causing her extreme emotional distress. Ferreyr, a former soap-opera star in Brazil, said Soros had given the apartment he had promised her to another girlfriend. She also claimed he assaulted her. Soros has dismissed Ferreyr’s claims as “frivolous and entirely without merit” and “riddled with false charges and obviously an attempt to extract money.”

Despite his baggage, the man who now views himself as a statesman-philanthropist is undeterred. Having profited from unregulated markets, he now wants to deliver us from them. Take Europe. He’s now convinced that “if you have a disorderly collapse of the euro, you have the danger of a revival of the political conflicts that have torn Europe apart over the centuries—an extreme form of nationalism, which manifests itself in xenophobia, the exclusion of foreigners and ethnic groups. In Hitler’s time, that was focused on the Jews. Today, you have that with the Gypsies, the Roma, which is a small minority, and also, of course, Muslim immigrants.”

It is “now more likely than not” that Greece will formally default in 2012, Soros will tell leaders in Davos this week. He will castigate European leaders who seem to know only how to “do enough to calm the situation, not to solve the problem.” If Germany’s Angela Merkel or France’s Nicolas Sarkozy nurses any lingering hopes of finding their salvation outside the continent, they are mistaken. “I took a recent trip to China, and China won’t come to Europe’s rescue,” Soros says. Despite all its woes, he nevertheless thinks the euro will—just barely—survive.

While Soros, whose new book, Financial Turmoil in Europe and the United States, will be published in early February, is currently focused on Europe, he’s quick to claim that economic and social divisions in the U.S. will deepen, too. He sympathizes with the Occupy movement, which articulates a widespread disillusionment with capitalism that he shares. People “have reason to be frustrated and angry” at the cost of rescuing the banking system, a cost largely borne by taxpayers rather than shareholders or bondholders.

Occupy Wall Street “is an inchoate, leaderless manifestation of protest,” but it will grow. It has “put on the agenda issues that the institutional left has failed to put on the agenda for a quarter of a century.” He reaches for analysis, produced by the political blog ThinkProgress.org, that shows how the Occupy movement has pushed issues of unemployment up the agenda of major news organizations, including MSNBC, CNN, and Fox News. It reveals that in one week in July of last year the word “debt” was mentioned more than 7,000 times on major U.S. TV news networks. By October, mentions of the word “debt” had dropped to 398 over the course of a week, while “occupy” was mentioned 1,278 times, “Wall Street” 2,378 times, and “jobs” 2,738 times. You can’t keep a financier away from his metrics.

As anger rises, riots on the streets of American cities are inevitable. “Yes, yes, yes,” he says, almost gleefully. The response to the unrest could be more damaging than the violence itself. “It will be an excuse for cracking down and using strong-arm tactics to maintain law and order, which, carried to an extreme, could bring about a repressive political system, a society where individual liberty is much more constrained, which would be a break with the tradition of the United States.”

In spite of his warnings of political turmoil in the U.S., he has no plans to engage in politics directly. “I would prefer not to be involved in party politics. It’s only because I felt that the Bush administration was misleading the country that I became involved. I was very hopeful of a new beginning with Obama, and I’ve been somewhat disappointed. I remain a supporter of the Democratic Party, but I’m fully aware of their shortcomings.” Soros believes Obama still has a chance of winning this year’s election. “Obama might surprise the public. The main issue facing the electorate is whether the rich should be taxed more. It shouldn’t be a difficult argument for Obama to make.”

If there is a glimmer of hope for the world in 2012, Soros believes it lies in emerging markets. The democratic-reform movement that has spread across the Middle East, the rise of democracy and economic growth in Africa, even reform in Russia may yet drag the world out of the mire. “While the developed world is in a deep crisis, the future for the developing world is very positive. The aspiration of people for an open society is very inspiring. You have people in Africa lining up for many hours when they are given an opportunity to vote. Dictators have been overthrown. It is very encouraging for freedom and growth.”

Soros insists the key to avoiding cataclysm in 2012 is not to let the crises of 2011 go to waste. “In the crisis period, the impossible becomes possible. The European Union could regain its luster. I’m hopeful that the United States, as a political entity, will pass a very severe test and actually strengthen the institution.” Nor has he quite given up hope that the central bankers and prime ministers gathering in Davos this week have got what it takes to rally round and prove him wrong. This time, being wrong would make him happy indeed.

Are we really stuck with this guy? It’s the question being asked around the globe, because Donald Trump’s first week as president has made it all too clear: Yes, he is as crazy as everyone feared. Remember those optimistic pre-inauguration fantasies? I cherished them, too. You know: “Once he’s president, I’m sure he’ll realize it doesn’t really make sense to withdraw from all those treaties.” “Once he’s president, surely he’ll understand that he needs to stop tweeting out those random insults.” “Once he’s president, he’ll have to put aside that ridiculous campaign braggadocio about building a wall along the Mexican border.” And so on.

Nope. In his first week in office, Trump has made it eminently clear that he meant every loopy, appalling word — and then some.

The result so far: The president of China is warning against trade wars and declaring that Beijing will take up the task of defending globalization and free trade against American protectionism. The president of Mexico has canceled a state visit to Washington, and prominent Mexican leaders say Trump’s proposed border wall “could take us to a war — not a trade war.” Senior leaders in Trump’s own party are denouncing the new president’s claims of widespread voter fraud and his reported plans to reopen CIA “black sites.” Oh, and the entire senior management team at the U.S. Department of State has resigned.

Meanwhile, Trump’s approval ratings are lower than those of any new U.S. president in the history of polling: Just 36 percent of Americans are pleased with his performance so far. Some 80 percent of British citizens think Trump will make a “bad president,” along with 77 percent of those polled in France and 78 percent in Germany.

And that’s just week one. Thus the question: Are we truly stuck with Donald Trump? It depends.There are essentially four ways to get rid of a crummy president.There are essentially four ways to get rid of a crummy president. First, of course, the world can just wait patiently for November 2020 to roll around, at which point, American voters will presumably have come to their senses and be prepared to throw the bum out.

But after such a catastrophic first week, four years seems like a long time to wait. This brings us to option two: impeachment. Under the U.S. Constitution, a simple majority in the House of Representatives could vote to impeach Trump for “treason, bribery, or other high crimes or misdemeanors.” If convicted by the Senate on a two-thirds vote, Trump could be removed from office — and a new poll suggests that after week one, more than a third of Americans are already eager to see Trump impeached.

If impeachment seems like a fine solution to you, the good news is that Congress doesn’t need evidence of actual treason or murder to move forward with an impeachment: Practically anything can be considered a “high crime or misdemeanor.” (Remember, former President Bill Clinton was impeached for lying about his affair with Monica Lewinsky). The bad news is that Republicans control both the House and the Senate, making impeachment politically unlikely, unless and until Democrats retake Congress. And that can’t happen until the elections of 2018.

Anyway, impeachments take time: months, if not longer — even with an enthusiastic Congress. And when you have a lunatic controlling the nuclear codes, even a few months seems like a perilously long time to wait. How long will it take before Trump decides that “you’re fired” is a phrase that should also apply to nuclear missiles? (Aimed, perhaps, atMexico?)

In these dark days, some around the globe are finding solace in the 25th Amendment to the Constitution. This previously obscure amendment states that “the Vice President and a majority of … the principal officers of the executive departments” can declare the president “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office,” in which case “the Vice President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President.”

This is option three for getting rid of Trump: an appeal to Vice President Mike Pence’s ambitions. Surely Pence wants to be president himself one day, right? Pence isn’t exactly a political moderate — he’s been unremittingly hostile to gay rights, he’s a climate change skeptic, etc. — but, unappealing as his politics may be to many Americans, he does not appear to actually be insane. (This is the new threshold for plausibility in American politics: “not actually insane.”)

Presumably, Pence is sane enough to oppose rash acts involving, say, the evisceration of all U.S. military alliances or America using nuclear weapons first — and presumably, if things got bad enough, other Trump cabinet members might also be inclined to oust their boss and replace him with his vice president. Congress would have to acquiesce in a permanent 25th Amendment removal, but if Pence and half the cabinet declared Trump unfit, even a Republican-controlled Congress would likely fall in line.

The fourth possibility is one that until recently I would have said was unthinkable in the United States of America: a military coup, or at least a refusal by military leaders to obey certain orders.

The principle of civilian control of the military has been deeply internalized by the U.S. military, which prides itself on its nonpartisan professionalism. What’s more, we know that a high-ranking lawbreaker with even a little subtlety can run rings around the uniformed military. During the first years of the George W. Bush administration, for instance, formal protests from the nation’s senior-most military lawyers didn’t stop the use of torture. When military leaders objected to tactics such as waterboarding, the Bush administration simply bypassed the military, getting the CIA and private contractors to do their dirty work.

But Trump isn’t subtle or sophisticated: He sets policy through rants and late-night tweets, not through quiet hints to aides and lawyers. He’s thin-skinned, erratic, and unconstrained — and his unexpected, self-indulgent pronouncements are reportedly sending shivers through even his closest aides.

What would top U.S. military leaders do if given an order that struck them as not merely ill-advised, but dangerously unhinged? An order that wasn’t along the lines of “Prepare a plan to invade Iraq if Congress authorizes it based on questionable intelligence,” but “Prepare to invade Mexico tomorrow!” or “Start rounding up Muslim Americans and sending them to Guantánamo!” or “I’m going to teach China a lesson — with nukes!”

It’s impossible to say, of course. The prospect of American military leaders responding to a presidential order with open defiance is frightening — but so, too, is the prospect of military obedience to an insane order. After all, military officers swear to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States, not the president. For the first time in my life, I can imagine plausible scenarios in which senior military officials might simply tell the president: “No, sir. We’re not doing that,” to thunderous applause from the New York Times editorial board. Brace yourselves. One way or another, it’s going to be a wild few years.

The videotaped sucker punch that staggered the white nationalist Richard Spencer on Inauguration Day quickly inspired mockery on social media. But it echoed loudly in an escalating confrontation between extreme ends of the political spectrum. With far-right groups edging into the mainstream with the rise of President Trump, self-described anti-fascists and anarchists are vowing to confront them at every turn, and by any means necessary — including violence.

In Berkeley, Calif., on Wednesday night, masked protesters set fires, smashed windows and stormed buildings on the campus of the University of California to shut down a speech by Milo Yiannopoulos, an inflammatory Breitbart News editor and a right-wing provocateur already barred from Twitter. Five people were injured, administrators canceled the event, and the university police locked down the campus for hours. That followed a bloody melee in Seattle on Inauguration Day, Jan. 20, when black-clad demonstrators — their faces concealed to minimize the risk of arrest — tried to prevent a speech by Mr. Yiannopoulos at the University of Washington, and a 34-year-old anti-fascist was shot and seriously wounded by a supporter of Mr. Yiannopoulos.

The outbreaks of destruction and violence since Mr. Trump’s inauguration have earned contempt from Republicans — including Trump supporters who say it is exactly why they voted for his promises of law and order — and condemnation from Democrats like Berkeley’s mayor, Jesse Arreguín. He called Wednesday’s display “contrary to progressive values” and said it “provided the ultranationalist far right exactly the images they want” to try to discredit peaceful protesters of Mr. Trump’s policies. But anarchists and anti-fascists, who often make up a small but disproportionately attention-getting portion of protesters, defend the mayhem they create as a necessary response to an emergency.

“Yes, what the black bloc did last night was destructive to property,” Eric Laursen, a writer in Massachusetts who has helped publicize anarchist protests, said, using another name for the black-clad demonstrators. “But do you just let someone like Milo go wherever he wants and spread his hate? That kind of argument can devolve into ‘just sit on your hands and wait for it to pass.’ And it doesn’t.”

Anarchists also say their recent efforts have been wildly successful, both by focusing attention on their most urgent argument — that Mr. Trump poses a fascist threat — and by enticing others to join their movement. “The number of people who have been showing up to meetings, the number of meetings, and the number of already-evolving plans for future actions is through the roof,” Legba Carrefour, who helped organize the so-called Disrupt J20 protests on Inauguration Day in Washington, said in an interview.

“Gained 1,000 followers in the last week,” trumpeted @NYCAntifa, an anti-fascist Twitter account in New York, on Jan. 24. “Pretty crazy for us as we’ve been active for many years with minimal attention. SMASH FASCISM!” The movement even claims to be finding adherents far afield of major population centers. A participant in CrimethInc, a decades-old anarchist network, pointed to rising attendance at its meetings and activity cropping up in new places like Omaha. “The Left ignores us. The Right demonizes us,” the anarchist website It’s Going Down boasted on Twitter. “Everyday we grow stronger.”

Little known to practitioners of mainstream American politics, militant anti-fascists make up a secretive culture closely associated with anarchists. Both reject social hierarchies as undemocratic and eschew the political parties as hopelessly corrupt, according to interviews with a dozen anarchists around the country. While some anarchists espouse nonviolence, others view property damage and even physical attacks on the far right as important tactics. While extreme right-wing groups have been enthusiastic supporters of Mr. Trump, anti-fascists express deep disdain for the Democratic Party. And it is mutual, by and large: They amount to the left’s unwanted revolutionary stepchild, disowned for their tactics and ideology by all but the most radical politicians.

Anarchists came to the fore in 1999, when they mounted a huge demonstration in Seattle against the World Trade Organization, which they denounce — along with Nafta and other free-trade pacts — as a plutocratic back-room group that exploits the poor. Enthusiasm for the movement dipped after the election of President Barack Obama. But it revived as they played a role in some of the most consequential protests during his two terms, starting Occupy Wall Street and serving as foot soldiers in demonstrations against the Dakota Access Pipeline at Standing Rock in North Dakota and in Black Lives Matter protests in Ferguson, Mo., and elsewhere.

“We’ve had an enormous cultural and political impact,” said David Graeber, a professor at the London School of Economics who helped organize the Occupy protests and has been credited with coining its “we are the 99 percent” slogan. He said the movement had elevated income inequality to the top of the Democratic political agenda, despite not electing anyone or enacting any legislation. But he said Mr. Trump’s victory had proved that anarchists’ diagnosis of society’s ills was correct. “We tried to warn you, with Occupy,” Dr. Graeber said. “We understood that people were sick of the political system, which is fundamentally corrupt. People want something radically different.”

Mr. Trump’s tirades against trade deals, globalization and a Washington elite he views as corrupt mirror arguments that anarchists have been making for decades. But his claim that he alone can fix America’s problems flies in the face of anarchists’ conviction that only direct action by ordinary people can produce a fair system. “Fascism fetishizes having a strong leader who is decisive and tells everyone what to do,” Mr. Laursen, the writer, said. “That’s what we are seeing with Trump.”

Fueled in part by Mr. Trump’s political success, violent clashes between the far right and far left erupted several times during the presidential campaign. In Anaheim, Calif., last February, three people were stabbed in a brawl after anti-fascists disrupted a Ku Klux Klan rally. And in Sacramento in June, at least five people were stabbed and eight wounded when hundreds of counterprotesters, including anti-fascists, clashed with skinheads at a rally.

But the confrontations seemed to shift into a new gear on the eve of Mr. Trump’s inauguration. On Jan. 19, anti-fascists tried to block the entrance to the “DeploraBall,” a party for Trump supporters. The next day, 230 people were arrested after anarchists dressed in black broke the windows of a bank with baseball bats and set a limousine on fire. (Mr. Spencer, the white nationalist, whose assailant was not arrested, was not the only person struck: A videographer was struck in the chest with a flagpole — he was unharmed — as he tried to interview marching anarchists about what the word “community” meant to them.)

One of those arrested, a self-described anarchist who insisted on anonymity to avoid aiding in his own prosecution, said the goal of the protests — to get television stations to cut away from the inauguration, even for a moment — had been met. “Certainly, it has brought more attention to people who were against Trump and what he stands for,” the man said by telephone. The question now is whether anarchists’ efforts against Mr. Trump — whether merely colorful and spirited, or lawless and potentially lethal — will earn their fringe movement a bigger presence in the battle of ideas in years to come.

“It’s true that a lot of people who consider themselves liberals or progressives still cling to the idea that you can effect social and economic change in the context of the state, through electoral politics,” Mr. Laursen said. “But more and more, it is going to become necessary for people on the left to think like anarchists if they are going to get anywhere.”

If the Berkeley disturbances have invited widespread denunciations, the on-camera punch of Mr. Spencer inflamed emotions on both the left and the right wing. Mr. Spencer has offered a reward for anyone who can identify his attacker, who wore the telltale clothing and face-covering of the anarchist “black bloc.” But anarchists in Philadelphia have already begun raising funds for the man’s legal defense should he ever be caught.

Under the hashtag #PunchRichardSpencerAgain, anti-fascists and anarchists across the country are vowing to continue the fight. “May all your punches hit Nazis,” read a headline on It’s Going Down on Sunday. A few days earlier, the website gleefully announced on Twitter that Mr. Spencer was planning a tour of college campuses, adding, “Everyone will get their chance!”

The anti-Trump resistance will fail if we don't ditch establishment Democrats

If the last week has shown us anything, it’s that Donald Trump has power, but he doesn’t have much of a mandate yet. We need to keep it that way – and be wary of the bad political leadership and strategy that can help him build one. November’s election is a powerful reminder that the Clinton establishment’s mix of socially inclusive rhetoric and neoliberal economics is a weak response to xenophobic populism.

An anti-Trump resistance movement must be broad, but it must direct its anger and energy not just at the enemy in the White House, but the failed leadership that let him get there. The Tea Party movement couldn’t have emerged with Bob Dole and George W Bush among their leaders. We can’t build our anti-Trump resistance, settled with generations of unpopular Democratic party leaders either.

The alternative must come from below – and certainly protests like the Women’s March are inspiring starts. Millions marched, many of whom had never attended a political protest before. It was hopefully a sign of things to come. Yet it is crucial that we know what this broad movement is for, as well as what it is against.

For years, myself and others posed a divide in the Democratic party that seemingly existed only notionally: a gap between social democratic demands at the base of the party and technocratic neoliberalism at the top of it. The Sanders campaign made that divide more real and tangible – it stirred a rabid opposition to Clintonism within millions of people, many of them politicized for the first time, and more importantly presented an alternative politics.

Now a whole generation of Sanders Democrats are engaged in a process that at its best creatively produces divisions and polarizations within the party that complements the organizing that is going on outside of it.

The broad sketches of an alternative-left politics in the Trump era are emerging. Socialists and others are doing their part building social movements organized around real, uncompromising demands for things such as free public higher education and a dignified healthcare system to expand the base for progressive politics, while using local elections (both within Democratic primaries and as independents) to spread their message far and wide. But though he’s seemingly in disarray now, we must be wary of the ways in which Trump’s support can easily be bolstered.

We should be very afraid when the president of the Building Trades Unions umbrella group, Sean McGarvey, calls the meeting he had with Trump last week the best of his life. Our response in the labor movement must be to support rank-and-file struggles against leaders prone to conciliation for even the most meager of concessions. We must demand the same accountability from liberal organizations and the Democratic party as well.

There is no doubt that this stance will put like-minded leftists and liberals in direct confrontation with establishment Democrats and their assorted lackies. There is every reason to believe that if confronted, this caste can be overtaken. We’re in a shocking new political era. Just in the past few months, thousands of people have joined leftwing organizations such as the Democratic Socialists of America, and millions more are trying to get active politically at the local level.

But we’ve seen time and time again – the antiwar movement of the 2000s being just the most recent example – of what happens when people subordinate all other political priorities to fighting Enemy No 1.

Trump is bad and needs to resisted, we all know that. But the Sanders left and its allies are the only force in the US that have the ideas that can win an immediate majority in this country: a class-based movement for jobs and justice. That vision must triumph over not just Trump, but the Democratic leadership. Because, frankly, it might be the last hope for democratic politics in this country. Now more than ever we need something to fight for, not just something to fight against.

Ron Paul: Economic Collapse Imminent - Trump will Get the Blame Instead of the FED

If former Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) is correct, an Economic Doomsday is here. The second financial bubble is going to soon burst, and there’s nothing anyone can do about it. That’s because, as Paul stated, the Federal Reserve has set up the American economy for financial collapse for printing trillions of dollars back in 2008 and 2009.

“The Federal Reserve’s policies of printing trillions of dollars back in ’08-09 have locked into place a serious financial crisis at some point in our future,” Paul stated. Going so far as to intimate the financial collapse will occur at least some time in the next two years Paul wrote, “It’s unavoidable, and even Donald Trump can’t stop it.”

Paul said Trump will be the patsy for the supposed impending financial ruin. Just like everyone blamed Obama for the financial collapse in 2009, this time, “Trump will unfairly get the blame,” the former Texas representative wrote. Paul bases his comments on reports he says he’s read which concludes that within the next 18-24 months, the collapse will happen.

The former congressman further explained he’s still holding out hope for Trump to make changes which can help to protect America’s future, but pointed out some of Trump’s staff has direct connections to Wall Street. He’s also concerned Trump’s war against radical Islam is a war Trump cannot win because it’s a war against an ideology, much like America’s failed attempt at defeating communism.

Paul believes Trump’s moving in the right direction to protect America’s interests by canceling America’s involvement in the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade agreement with Asia. Paul also hopes Trump will pull American troops out of the at least 7 countries in which it is currently deployed and engaged in military conflict. “I say just come home,” Paul said when addressing having our military presence overseas. “Just get out of there and let the local people sort (the conflict) this out,” Paul said in response to how America should deal with hot spots like the Ukraine and Syria.

Paul believes the former administration’s posturing and threatening of China was misguided and stated we’d be better of trading goods with China, and all of Asia, rather than trading threats. However, as te Free Thought Project pointed out, Trump is already carrying on this dangerous posture — and China is responding.

Paul warns there’s going to be an acceleration of black ops operations by the CIA and Special Forces missions such as the joint special operations command (JSOC) which, as The Free Thought Project has reported, answers directly to the President of the United States.

Paul, who has never supported Trump is concerned about Trump’s ego, wondering if he’s going to act on his impulses to go after the ideology of radical Islam. Paul reminded his viewers that the way to create more jihadists is to keep on provoking the moderate Muslims into becoming radicalized by reacting to U.S. military actions overseas — the exact same thing Trump is doing right now.

Paul praised President Obama’s actions to normalize relations with Cuba and he hopes that with all of the policy decisions the Trump administration is making, that Trump will maintain the policy Obama implemented with Cuba and continue to keep the negotiations open with our closest Southern Caribbean neighbor.

Paul noted that he thinks U.S. policy has created a “failed system” in the country. “All empires end and we’re the empire. It’s going to end and it’s going to be for economic reasons…we’re going to fail because we’re working within a failed system…this is a monetary problem…a spending problem…it’s going to be financial,” Paul emphatically claimed, once again stating the collapse of America is imminent. “We have something arriving worse than 2008, 2009, much worse…It was the fault of the Federal Reserve,” Paul said, adding, the Keynesian economic model contributed greatly to the first bubble burst. Paul said the left will blame Trump for it like the right did to Obama, but he says it’s bigger than the office of the president, and blames the federal reserve and the previous 17 years of governmental spending.

If you think Ron Paul’s comments hold no water, think again. As the Free Thought Project reported last year, even the former chairmen of the Federal Reserve is predicting this crisis.

We are in very early days of a crisis which has got a way to go,” asserted Alan Greenspan to Bloomberg last year. “This is the worst period, I recall since I’ve been in public service. There’s nothing like it, including the crisis — remember October 19th, 1987, when the Dow went down by a record amount 23 percent? That I thought was the bottom of all potential problems. This has a corrosive effect that will not go away. I’d love to find something positive to say…..I don’t know how it’s going to resolve, but there’s going to be a crisis.”

When the man who used to run the very central bank Ron Paul says is responsible for the collapse, also says there’s going to be a collapse — it’s time to pay attention.

In Part I,
we discussed the anatomy of an asset bubble, explored the tech bubble,
and learned what caused the housing bubble. An asset bubble, as we have
seen, is one of the most destructive financial forces on the planet.
However, if you understand the stages of a bubble, if you understand
what to look for and how to respond, you have the potential to avoid
losing a great deal of money and suffering grief. Bubbles occur when
excess money flows into an asset or asset group causing its price to
rise beyond a reasonable level. In addition, there are factors specific
to each bubble as well as factors common to all. In this article, we’ll
identify a bubble which appears to be forming now and discuss what you
can do to protect yourself against its destruction.

The Next Bubble?

I believe a bubble is forming in U.S. stocks. Why? In an ideal world,
stocks perform best when certain factors are present. For example, an
expanding economy which boosts corporate profits, low interest rates,
and especially, the lack of attractive investment alternatives. In the
following paragraphs we’ll discuss the various options available to
investors today and examine the relative appeal of each.

Cash Has Been Dethroned

There is an old saying, “Cash is king.” However, with interest rates
near zero, I’d say cash’s reign is over, at least temporarily. Because
of its paltry return, we can eliminate this as an attractive investment.
Although safe from market fluctuations, cash is basically a temporary
parking place for money waiting to be invested. Outside of the U.S.,
cash is paying next to nothing in most of the developed world, including
the U.S., Europe, Japan, and others. In smaller, emerging countries,
short-term savings rates are higher but have been falling. As short-term
rates continue to decline in these countries, cash investments will
become less appealing. This leaves bonds and stocks. We’ll examine bonds
next.

Bonds Are For Getting Out of Jail

Bond returns are derived from two things: periodic coupon payments and
the change in a bonds price. Bonds are also subject to interest rate
fluctuations. In short, when interest rates rise, bond prices fall and
vice versa. Because interest rates are already very low in the larger,
developed countries, buying bonds in these nations has a poor risk
profile. In other words, there is too much risk and too little potential
reward. Why? Because when interest rates rise, bond prices will decline
and investors will lose. The best time to buy bonds is when interest
rates are high. If a bond is purchased when interest rates are high,
because the investor’s periodic interest is tied to the bond’s annual
coupon, the investor will receive a higher income stream. Today, with
rates as low as they are, assuming the investor bought bonds after rates
declined, bond holders are not receiving as much income as they did
prior to 2008.

Interest
rates are generally higher in smaller, emerging countries. This fact
alone makes bonds from these locations more appealing. However, in these
smaller countries, you have to be concerned about two things. The first
issue is the credit rating of the country or issuer. This can be
affected by the political climate in that country or region of the
world. The second issue is the value of the U.S. dollar relative to the
currency of the country where the issuer is domiciled. However, as
previously mentioned, interest rates in these smaller, emerging
economies are also trending lower. Once they reach a certain level, new
bonds from these locations will have very little appeal. Thus far, we
have ruled out cash. Bonds are a bit more attractive but that appeal may
be fading fast. Now we’ll take a brief look at currencies.

The
value of one currency is relative to the value of another. For example,
if the U.S. dollar gains strength versus the Euro, it can be said that
the dollar became stronger or the Euro weakened. Currency fluctuations
can have a significant effect on investors. If a U.S. investor invests
in a basket of European stocks and the stocks increase by 10% over the
course of a year, if the Euro weakened by the same percentage, the U.S.
investor would essentially break even. Not only do currency values
impact investors, they are also an option for direct investing. Because
this is slightly off the target of this article, we’ll dispense with a
more detailed discussion. With that, let’s turn our attention to hard
assets.

Hard Assets and Alternative Investments

Hard assets are tangible assets. This includes items such as real
estate, commodities, and anything which can be touched. Let’s begin with
real estate. U.S. home prices have been rising since hitting bottom in
mid to late 2011. However, U.S. housing starts are lower, down to levels
not seen since 1991. U.S. existing home sales are stronger than they
were in mid 2010 (which was a bottom), but are still much lower than
they were prior to the housing crisis. To be fair, the levels seen
during the housing bubble were unsustainable. In Europe, the second
largest economic block in the world, home prices have been trending
sideways after peaking in early 2008. Next, we’ll look at commodities.

In
general, commodity prices have been falling. After peaking in mid 2008,
commodity prices fell sharply. They peaked again (albeit to a much
lower level) in mid 2011. Since then, commodity prices have been
trending lower which is a reflection of weak demand due to weak economic
growth. There have been a few commodities that have had good
performance for brief periods since then but, as a group, commodities
have not been all that appealing. Now, let’s return to intangible
investments, specifically, U.S. stocks and discuss why a bubble may be
in the works.

Stocks: Best Investment by Default?

As mentioned, stocks tend to do well when two things are present. The
first is a reasonably strong economy which boosts demand and increases
corporate profits. The second is the absence of good alternatives. If
there are very few good alternatives in which to invest, because money
needs to be invested, more of it would flow into stocks which would tend
to push their prices higher. Both of these conditions are present
today. With fewer good options, stocks would be the recipient of excess
capital and could become the preferred investment merely by default.

Quick Recap

With cash paying near zero and global interest rates trending lower
(not so much in the U.S.) causing bonds to lose their appeal, the
attractiveness of stocks has increased. Most of the larger, developed
nations are in the throes of weak economic growth. Moreover, the
smaller, emerging countries are not large enough to foster strong
economic growth for an extended period on their own. That leaves the
U.S., which is one of the few economic bright spots in the world today.
To summarize, if the rest of the world’s economies continue to weaken
and if global interest rates continue to fall and finally, if the U.S.
economy continues to expand, U.S. stocks could continue to be the
favored investment. This would result in excess inflows which would tend
to push stock prices higher. These factors have the potential to create
one of the greatest bubbles in modern times. To further support this
view, let’s look at the following chart.

There
are actually two charts in the illustration. The chart on top is the
S&P 500 Index which includes 500 large U.S. companies. The chart
beneath it is Warren Buffett’s preferred stock market valuation ratio
which is “total market cap to GDP.” As you can see, in the bottom chart a
reading above 100 (i.e. the red line) is considered overvalued. When
the tech bubble burst, the valuation ratio peaked at a level of 148.5,
almost 50% above the fair value line. During the housing bubble, the
ratio hit a high of only 109.4 on June 4, 2007. Today, the ratio is at
125.7 (up slightly from the day I prepared the chart). Therefore, the
ratio today is higher than in 2007 but less than it was during the tech
bubble. During the housing bubble though, there were other factors that
contributed to the collapse in stocks. Are we witnessing another asset
bubble today?

As
U.S. stocks continue to gain favor, due in part to a lack of good
alternatives, money will flow into stocks, pushing prices higher and
valuations will continue to rise. It’s important to remember that as
soon as a valuation ratio hits some predetermined level, stock prices
will not necessarily fall. To the contrary, even if this ratio measures
the valuation of stocks with great accuracy, the key to the next
downturn will be determined by investor sentiment. In other words, stock
prices will tumble when investors begin to sell en masse.
Unfortunately, there is no specified level in this ratio by which we can
determine that a stock correction is imminent. However, with today’s
ratio as high as it is, it’s a good idea to keep a watchful eye on your
stock exposure. To protect this part of your portfolio, consider using
stop orders, trailing stop orders (my favorite), buy options, etc. to
shield you from large losses. Until the next correction materializes, we
won’t know the extent of this particular bubble. However, the longer
things persists and the more money that flows into U.S. stocks, the
greater the likelihood is that we are in the midst of an asset bubble of
significant magnitude. Therefore, we won’t know for sure until the next
market correction is upon us.

All we have to do to highlight the enormous hypocrisy and double
standards which are the hallmark of domestic and international politics
is to switch the names around. Actions taken by Western
establishment approved countries and actors which are deemed to be
totally uncontroversial-would be deemed to be ‘absolutely outrageous’ if
done to them.

Here’s a few examples:

Just imagine…
if a close Russian ally, whose forces were trained by Russia, was
bombing the poorest country in the Middle East, with cluster bombs
supplied by Moscow. Furthermore, in the country that was being attacked, a famine threatened the lives millions of people. Well,
the poorest country in the Middle East is Yemen, and it’s being bombed
to smithereens by the one of the richest, Saudi Arabia, a close ally of
Britain, using UK-made
cluster bombs. And guess what, the West’s ‘something must be done
brigade,' who expressed so much ’humanitarian’ concern over the fighting
to regain Aleppo from Al-Qaeda/Al Nusra terrorists, are silent. How
strange.

Just imagine… if a plane carrying members of a famous French
military choir had crashed on Christmas Day, killing everyone on board.
And that shortly afterwards, a leading Russian ’satirical magazine’ had mocked
the tragedy, drawing cartoons of the choir singing to 'a new audience’
on the seabed and posted a caption saying that the only ‘bad news’ about
the crash was that French President Francois Hollande had not been on
board. There would, I’m sure, have been plenty of 'superior’ discussion
in Western media about the 'moral depravity' and the 'dark soul’ of the
Russian character. But the plane that crashed was carrying Russian
singers. And it was the elite-approved Charlie Hebdo magazine which
poked fun at the dead. So there was no outcry in the West. And no accusations of ‘racism.'

Just imagine…
if it had been NATO, and not the Warsaw Pact, which had been disbanded
at the end of the old Cold War. And then Russia, breaking the promises
it had made to the US President, had expanded the Warsaw Pact right up
to the borders of the USA, deploying thousands of troops and dozens of tanks
and other military hardware in Mexico and Canada. Would commentators
in ‘respectable‘ establishment journals be calling this ‘American
aggression‘? I think not.

Just imagine... if a senior
political officer at the Russian Embassy in London had been caught on
film talking about the ‘take down’ of a British Foreign Officer Minister
deemed to be too critical of Russia and who was causing the country "a lot of problems."
That there was a group called ‘Labour Friends of Russia’ and the
political officer said the Embassy had a fund of more than £1m for them?
We can be sure that the revelations would have led, at the very least,
to diplomatic expulsions, the announcement of a full-scale government
investigation, as well as a plethora of articles on the ‘outrageous’
interference by Russia in British political affairs. But the senior
political officer caught on film
was working for Israel, so a potential plot about the ’take down’ of a
UK minister was deemed to be not a very important news story. By more or
less the same people who would have been telling us it was a very
important news story if it had involved Russia.

Just imagine… if Hillary Clinton and not Donald Trump had
won the US Presidential election in November and Trump’s supporters had
behaved in the way that Clinton’s have. That intelligence officials had
tried to de-legitimize Clinton’s victory by claiming Saudi interference
in the election, and produced as proof of this a document which drew
attention to Saudi TV‘s alleged pro-Clinton stance. Then,
a week before the inauguration of President-elect Clinton was due to
take place, the US media publicized a dossier compiled by an
ex-intelligence officer from another country claiming Saudi Arabia was
blackmailing Clinton, even though the dossier was unverified and
contained glaring factual errors. The papers would I’m sure be full of
commentary from ’liberal’ pundits raging about a ‘coup’ and
anti-democratic attempts to overturn the election result. However, Trump
won on November 8th, and not Clinton, so he’s fair game for 'Deep
State' attacks. All in the name of 'democracy.'

Just imagine…
if UK Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn had urged MPs to support a
socialist ’Peace Rocket,' which would cost the British taxpayer at least
£31 billion and possibly as much as £205 billion, over its lifetime.
That Corbyn had praised the ‘Peace Rocket’ as being ’worth every penny’
and absolutely essential for Britain and for the peace of the world.
Then, after Parliament had voted in favor, it came to light that the
Peace Rocket had misfired on a test and that Corbyn had kept schtum
about it. That four times he had been asked by the BBC's Andrew Marr if
he had known about the misfire, and four times he had avoided answering the question. We
can be sure the calls for Corbyn to resign would have been deafening.
That there would have been fearsome denunciations of the 'enormous
waste' of taxpayers money on a 'socialist vanity project.' And that the
vote on the ‘Peace Rocket’ would be held again. But it was the
elite-approved Trident and not a socialist ‘Peace Rocket‘ that misfired,
so the response has been very different.

We’re told the malfunction of Britain’s ‘independent nuclear
deterrent,’ and the failure of the government to mention it before
Parliament voted on renewal, is no big deal. That the misfiring Trident
is still worth spending billions of pounds of taxpayers money on at a
time of austerity. And of course, there is absolutely no need for
Parliament to debate the issue again… Just imagine... if Russia had spent $5 billion in trying to
bring about a regime change in Canada, with neo-Nazis providing the
‘cutting edge’ of anti-government protests. That torchlight processions
by neo-Nazis and ultra-nationalists -commemorating wartime SS divisions
were held in the new ‘democratic’ Canada. We could expect
widespread condemnations and denunciations of Russia’s ‘links’ to the
’far right.' But it's happening in Ukraine. And guess what? The West’s
‘fascism is coming’ brigade are not the slightest bit interested.

Sorry haters, Russia has survived sanctions. It survived $35 oil. And
it survived two years of recession. Say what you will about Vladimir
Putin, Russia's economic management team has got its stuff together. And
for that reason, BlackRock says Russia is a buy. "What gets all of the attention regarding Russia is the geopolitics.
But for all the negative opinion you can have out there on Russia, from
an economic standpoint it's been amazing. We are overweight Russian
equities," says Gerardo Rodriguez, a fund manager with BlackRock in New
York.

So far this year, the Market Vectors small cap Russia exchange traded
fund (RSXJ) is up 8.34%, beating the MSCI Emerging Markets yet again.
That ETF is up 140% over the last 12 months and is a non-commodity,
non-financial trade into Russia.

Russian oil and gas companies, along with its biggest banks, were
sanctioned in the summer of 2014 following the March annexation of
Crimea, a Black Sea peninsula in southeastern Ukraine. Tension between
the West and Russia increased that year as a new, U.S. backed government
led by Arsesniy Yatsenyuk took hold in Kiev, sending Moscow into panic
mode. Russia quickly moved to back anti-government rebels in eastern
cities of Ukraine. Although Russia denied official support of
separatists, Putin later admitted that Russia was helping them fight the
Ukrainian government.

Russia and Ukraine signed a peace agreement in Minsk, the capital of
Belarus, but removal of sanctions is dependent on a peaceful ceasefire
in regions like Donbass and Luhansk, Ukraine. It is also dependent on
elections there, which puts Kiev in a tight spot because the mood in
those regions has been more pro-Russia than not. Sanction relief is
dependent on both sides ending the crisis in Ukraine, British Prime
Minister Theresa May said in Washington on Friday. The political noise about bad boy Russia is no longer getting in the
way of investors. Over the last two weeks, Russian securities have seen
millions in fresh new dollar inflows, according to fund tracking firm
EPFR Global in Cambridge, Mass. Rajiv Jain, CIO of GQG Partners is bullish on Russia, too. Jain
launches the GQG Partners Emerging Markets Equity Fund (GQGPX) next
week. Russian equities will be a big position.

"It's always hard to find tune the news coming out of Russia," says
Rodriguez. "Since the Crimea annexation, it's been hard to keep track of
reality based on the headlines we see here. So for us, we just look at
the data and the data shows Russia's finance ministers are still very
orthodoxed in their approach to handling their economy. You have to hand
it to them. In terms of fundamentals, Russia turned the corner a few
months ago. And if you factor in potential changes on sections and Trump
being willing to play ball with Putin, then all of this is very
supportive of Russia."

In December, Russian industrial production surprised positively, but
consumer demand remained weak. Russian industrial output rose 3.2% year
over year in December after a 2.7% annual increase in November, beating market expectations twice. For a third
consecutive month now, industrial output grew with Russian manufacturing
posting a solid 2.6% yearly gain in 2016 at a time when quarterly GDP
was zero. Retail sales are down by nearly 6% due to the recession and falling
incomes. Renaissance Capital, a Moscow based investment firm, thinks
Russian incomes will rise and the locals will start spending again. If
oil remains strong, 2017 promises to be another up year for Russian
stocks. "Healthier production and stronger real wages will lead Russia to a
broad recovery this year," say Renaissance analysts led by Oleg Kouzmin
in Moscow. If all goes well, Russia hits 1.7% GDP growth this year.

On February 10, 2007, Vladimir Putin delivered his keynote speech at
the Munich Security Conference, challenging the post-Cold War
establishment. RT looks back a decade to see how accurate his ideas
were.

The Munich speech presented criticism of a world in which
the US gets to unilaterally take decisions on most important global
issues with little regards to the interests of other nations, especially
those not allied with Washington. Putin called such a system inherently
unfair and posing various risks to the world, compared to an
alternative in which the US has to live by the same laws as the rest of
the world and negotiate on conflict issues rather than use military
force to resolve them.

“Just like any war, the Cold War left us
with live ammunition, figuratively speaking. I mean ideological
stereotypes, double standards and other typical aspects of Cold War bloc
thinking.”

Over the past year, the US media has upped its
rhetoric against Russia, going so far as to accuse it of war crimes and
of putting its pawn in the Oval Office.

“Unilateral and
frequently illegitimate actions have not resolved any problems.
Moreover, they have caused new human tragedies and created new centers
of tension. Judge for yourselves: wars as well as local and regional
conflicts have not diminished... And no fewer people perish in these
conflicts – even more are dying than before. Significantly more,
significantly more!”

Since 2007, the US has continued its
military action in Afghanistan and Iraq, played a key role in the
devastation in Libya, is currently contributing to the Saudi Arabian
intervention in Yemen and has attacked Syrian troops – presumably by
mistake.

“In
international relations, we increasingly see the desire to resolve a
given question according to so-called issues of political expediency,
based on the current political climate. And of course, this is extremely
dangerous. It results in the fact that no one feels safe. I want to
emphasize this – no one feels safe! Because no one can feel that
international law is like a stone wall that will protect them. Of
course, such a policy stimulates an arms race.”

Some leaders
tried to play nice and hope for the better. Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi paid
compensation and invested oil money in Western banks. This didn’t save
him from being summarily executed by US-supported insurgents. Or
Ukraine’s Viktor Yanukovich, who caved in to a US-backed armed coup and
signed a EU-brokered power-sharing deal with his opponents. The deal was
thrown away a day later, and the president reportedly barely dodged an
assassination attempt while fleeing to Russia.

“The use of force
can only be considered legitimate if the decision is sanctioned by the
UN,” Putin said. “And we do not need to substitute NATO or the EU for
the UN. When the UN truly unites the forces of the international
community and can really react to events in various countries, when we
leave behind this disdain for international law, then the situation will
be able to change. Otherwise the situation will simply result in a dead
end, and the number of serious mistakes will be multiplied.”

NATO’s
mandate in Libya was to protect civilians from airstrikes. The alliance
did this with a bombing campaign that targeted anything remotely
resembling a military asset. Apparently that included Gaddafi’s youngest
son and three grandchildren killed by a missile intended for the man
himself. The UK and France played key roles in the campaign.

“I
think it is obvious that NATO expansion does not have anything to do
with the modernization of the alliance itself or with ensuring security
in Europe,” Putin said back in 2007. “On the contrary, it represents a
serious provocation that reduces the level of mutual trust. And we have
the right to ask: against whom is this expansion intended? And what
happened to the assurances our western partners made after the
dissolution of the Warsaw Pact? Where are those declarations today? No
one even remembers them.“

Over the past decade, NATO has absorbed
two more nations, Albania and Croatia, and drawn closer with
Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Georgia. The Ukrainian government
has declared NATO membership a priority. NATO has deployed additional
troops at Russia’s border and moved to build an anti-missile system,
which Russia sees as a threat to its national security.

“Let's
say things as they are,” Putin said in his Munich speech. “One hand
distributes charitable help and the other hand not only preserves
economic backwardness but also reaps the profits from it. The increasing
social tension in depressed regions inevitably results in the growth of
radicalism and extremism, feeding terrorism and local conflicts. And if
all this happens in, shall we say, a region such as the Middle East
where there is increasingly the sense that the world at large is unfair,
then there is the risk of global destabilization.“

In Iraq and
Syria, the terrorist group Islamic State for a while managed to create a
more or less functioning state. Their success was to a great degree
fueled by propaganda that blamed alienation and disfranchisement of
Muslims to the malice of the West. This message attracts not only
desperate locals, but also Muslims in wealthy Western countries.